Tristan lifted his face from the dirt and snorted his nose free of vomit. Her window remained completely dark, but the memory of what he had seen could not be extinguished. He stood, but the world around him refused to settle. He swayed, uncertain. Wear your fate well, the rector had said, but that made no sense. Who was to say it was not his fate to fall back to the ground and die? How should such a defeat be worn? He lurched forward, his legs somehow aware of the need to move. He stumbled on. Not towards a future, but away from her. Away from the pain.
He found a low bridge and crept beneath it. He fell asleep as the sun rose, to the sounds of the occasional delivery truck rumbling overhead and a solitary bird singing to the daylight. When he woke again the sky had dimmed and his head throbbed from thirst and discomfort. Self-pity hung about him, but he needed to drink and that meant moving. He pissed into the dirty river then scrambled back to the road. He stood there waiting for some plan to take hold of him, listening for the familiar murmur of forming thoughts. His head though was quiet, as if his soul had returned to the hiding place. He looked over the side of the bridge and watched a discarded can float slowly past, tied to the black water’s ooze.
He remembered the envelope the rector had given him and opened it. There were papers and money as well as an address. He knew the street; it ran close to the docks and old warehouses still remaining from the days commerce ran the river.
The address led him to a building that had once served as the headquarters of a grain merchant and, according to its tarnished plaque, had stood for more than a century as a memorial to hungry endeavour. Now it was reduced to a warren of bricks, a maze in which every turn took the visitor a little further from the reach of God. Tristan presented his papers and explained that he needed to leave the City. A man with thick lips and unruly eyebrows checked the money and shook his head.
‘It’s barely enough.’
It was a bad lie smoothed by habit, but Tristan had no energy for arguing. He was taken to a holding room until the next night fell and then smuggled past the gates in the back of a truck that bumped and rattled its way across the empty land.
Tristan would never forget the moment he arrived in the heathen settlements. He stood where the truck had left him, fractured and uncomprehending. He had never seen so many people. The landscape wriggled with life like a leg of meat infested with maggots. It seemed that light and noise spilled through every crack. Tristan had been raised in a world where electricity was rationed and yet here, less than two hours of rutted track away, it was as if they struggled with a mighty surplus that had to be unloaded hot and buzzing into the streets before the whole place exploded.
The smugglers had provided Tristan with clothes. They were tatty but didn’t mark him as an outsider. It felt unnatural to have shoes on his feet and he scuffed along the footpaths with the slack-jawed wonderment of a junkie. Great towers stretched up into the sky and soon his neck ached from looking up at them. He stopped at a shopfront window and looked at a display of television screens, each reduced to the fuzzing of the late-night disconnection. The unpat-terned static provided a comfort of sorts and he stood numb before it.
Soon he realised he was not alone. Another man at the far end of the shopfront watched the same spectacle. For five empty minutes neither of them spoke. The other man’s clothes and skin were filthy. But then he smiled and Tristan almost cried with gratitude.
‘That there’s the big bang,’ the stranger said, ambling forward and nodding at the screens. ‘The static. It’s the background radiation from the beginning of time itself. Now it’s everywhere, a broken signal that can never be put back together. Beautiful, isn’t it.’
‘I too have broken apart,’ Tristan said. It was all he had, his leaky truth.
‘It happens to us all, brother,’ the man replied. ‘My name is William. Do you have a place to sleep tonight?’
Tristan shook his head, neither hopeful nor wary. He simply was. Life would happen to him now and he would let it, at least until the point where the sadness overwhelmed him.
‘Then neither do I,’ William chuckled. ‘Do you have any drink on you?’
Again Tristan shook his head.
‘Ah, well there’s a bigger problem. My name is William.’
‘You already told me that.’
This news seemed to trouble the man.
‘Have we met before?’
‘No.’
‘Well then, I don’t see how I could have told you.’ He eyed Tristan suspiciously.
‘My mistake.’
William had once been a tall man. If he straightened to look the world in the eye he could be tall again. But he stooped further as he moved away, his feet planted wide as if each moved in opposition to the other. He turned back to Tristan.
‘Are you coming or aren’t you?’
Tristan shrugged and followed, and so his first night in the heathen settlements did not kill him.
‘I lived long enough to find you. For that we can blame William, or the big bang, or any point in between.’
She said nothing. He couldn’t tell if she was still listening and perhaps it no longer mattered. He was rolling now, tumbling down the slope of their final chapter.
William led Tristan to the basement of a parking building where a group of homeless people had staked their claim. A fire burned in a drum and twenty or so figures circled in a dance of attraction and repulsion, drawn to the warmth yet wary of one another, each as uncertain as an electron, as sensitive to observation.
Planted on the only piece of furniture Tristan could see, a once-stately couch now grown humble, was a woman so fat she may well have been stranded. Two boys some years younger than Tristan sat one on either side of her swollen ankles, their jealous eyes on the pile of junk that served as fuel for the fire. The massive woman softly patted their heads and Tristan was sure he heard purring.
‘Fat Annie,’ William whispered as they approached. Tristan did not know if he was sharing a joke or explaining her proper title.
‘This is Tristan,’ William announced, as if presenting his queen with a captured prize from a distant land. She looked Tristan up and down. He felt nothing but weariness and a thick fuzzy sense of disconnection, as if he was descending into a dream.
‘What brings you here?’ asked the queen. Her voice was melodic, a throatful of notes resonating in her enormous bosom. Her eyes shone bright within fleshy caves.
‘My life,’ Tristan answered, not trying to amuse her but nonetheless bringing forth a laugh that gurgled its way up the scale.
‘Then you have stories to tell,’ Fat Annie said. ‘Come, sit beside me.’
That there was no space into which Tristan might settle seemed to cause Annie no concern. Tristan edged cautiously forward and she made a great show of shifting her bulk to the side, although this was ultimately as hopeless as pushing water from the shore. He sat and felt her great mass spill back over him.
‘This is cosy,’ she giggled. ‘Tell me, where are you from?’
‘The City of God,’ Tristan answered. He saw no point in lying. He saw no point in anything. She grasped his knee in delight.
‘I knew it.’ Fat Annie raised her voice so the others could hear her. ‘People, we have an angel amongst us. Come and listen to his stories.’
Seven or eight of them shuffled her way: curious, suspicious, perhaps resenting Tristan’s place on the throne. Fat Annie produced a bottle of dark liquid and after swigging heavily offered it to Tristan. It burned his throat, his stomach and his head. He thought vaguely that she might be poisoning him; his head felt light and unpossessed. His story stuttered forth.
The street people were a credulous, encouraging audience. They appeared fascinated by the strange otherness of life in the City and would not let him skimp on details. Tristan told them what he could of St Augustine’s, the rector and the experiments, and they grunted and wheezed their understanding. As Tristan’s story unfolded, a small hope rose in him. Perhaps these strangers would expose the rector’s tricks and free him from his failure. But that wasn’t where their interest lay. It was Tristan’s despair they found comfort in and, as the night grew small and the bottle emptied, Tristan found something similar in theirs.
It was the oddest feeling: a procession of filthy strangers making sounds of comfort and tapping him on the back as they dispersed, their eyes deep with a sadness he didn’t recognise. They were welcoming him, he realised.
Tristan sensed he was being ushered to his own funeral, but he offered no resistance. Someone gave him a dirty piece of cardboard to protect him from the concrete’s piercing cold. He lay on it and was surprised to see Fat Annie lumbering his way. She said nothing as she eased herself down behind him and he offered no complaint; the night was cold and her huge body generated unusual warmth. He found himself curling up as if a child again, and when her strangulated snoring started he backed further against her. As the night dissolved him he remembered Madame Grey, the woman who long ago had filled the mother-sized hole in his boyish imagination. The thought of it undid him and he felt tears turn icy on his cheeks.
The next morning Tristan woke cold and sore. His bones ached and his head was cut in two by a pain so sharp he could feel its edges. He looked at William, who was stooped over him, shaking him by the shoulder.
‘Come on, there’s work to be done.’
‘What work?’ Tristan asked.
‘Work that keeps you from dying,’ William said.
‘I’m happy to die,’ Tristan said, and it was no exaggeration. Giving in would have been as easy as closing his eyes. A great fleshy arm draped across him and he felt her breath rotten but gentle in his ear.
‘Leave the poor boy alone.’ Fat Annie pulled Tristan close and he felt himself disappearing into her warmth. ‘You stay there if you need to. You can start tomorrow as easy as today.’
Great globs of sadness dislodged deep in Tristan’s stomach and made their way to his throat. He pulled away from her, embarrassed, and wiped his eyes with his sleeve.
‘I’m all right,’ he answered in reply to the question that hadn’t been asked. ‘Show me what you need me to do.’
Over the following weeks William became Tristan’s teacher. He showed him how scavenging, theft and begging could be woven into a living of sorts. Each night they gathered in the basement around the fire’s puny warmth and offered Annie their pickings. Tristan did what he could but he was poorly suited to the work and felt ashamed by the little he contributed. Fat Annie assessed the bounty and then shared it amongst them all.
‘Why not each of us keep what we find?’ Tristan asked William. It pained him that others might think he was a burden.
‘Because keeping what you find is how it’s done in the settlements,’ William replied, ‘and it’s the settlements’ way of doing things that’s put us here.’
‘But it’s unfair.’
‘There are kinds of unfair,’ William said. ‘And this is the good kind.’
Each night, as darkness tightened around them, they were drawn back to Annie’s generous laugh, and encouraged to tell stories. Tristan became known as the saint. On evenings when drink made them sentimental, they had him lead them in prayer. A more pious, solemn congregation a pastor couldn’t hope for. It wasn’t unusual for the men to cry over verses long polished of meaning. Although the sadness didn’t leave him—it was always there humming in the background, threatening to bloom into hopelessness—the life became familiar and in its routine Tristan found a sort of comfort. The weeks turned to months and piece by piece he lost hold of the memory of self. He was one of them now, tangled and adrift on the same tide. Until winter came.
Storms swept in and there was no escaping the cold. The number in the basement swelled, making the sharing of their spoils more difficult. Suspicion and jealousy diminished them. Sleep became a luxury, stolen, like everything else, in small inadequate packages. But with sleep came nightmares. Every night Tristan was woken by screaming. Often it was his own. He stayed away from the drink—he had little stomach for it—but there was no escaping its corrosive power. Frightened men turned angry without warning; watchfulness became the natural state. The community lived on a knife’s edge, or if not a knife then a broken bottle or a length of discarded iron. An imagined wrong, a septic grudge: the violence was never far away. Despite the stories they shared, Tristan lay each night with strangers, each slowly drowning in the others’ failure.
Tim was the first to go under. He was a short man, his loose skin a reminder of a life in which food was plentiful. He spoke little, preferring to make his noise in song. He had a beautiful voice—some said he was once a professional singer—and when he sang troubles melted.
William found him sprawled behind a dumpster, his fading cough speckling blood across his chest. Tristan helped to carry him back to the basement, where they laid him on the couch. William knelt beside the dying man the whole afternoon, holding his hand and filling his ear with comforting lies.
Tim died as night fell, with the group watching over him. He was neither young nor old, in his forties Tristan guessed—too young to die. It had come suddenly, there had been no sign of illness, yet no one expressed surprise. Tristan looked down on the body and felt his own death waiting, fixed at that point where his future ended, drawing him ever nearer. He felt himself expanding with the need to scream but there was no one, nothing to scream at.
Tristan felt a hand on his shoulder. He turned to see Fat Annie leaning close. She motioned for him to follow her out of earshot of the group.
‘Are you all right?’
‘I’m better than him,’ Tristan replied, tasting the bitterness on his tongue.
‘You need to be calm now, Tristan,’ Annie told him. ‘We have a job for you. The time has come for you to help us.’
‘How?’ he asked.
‘I need you to help me with the burying.’
‘I can help with the digging,’ Tristan offered.
‘No. I mean with the prayers. Death requires a holy man.’
‘No.’ Tristan shook his head. ‘It wouldn’t be right.’
‘You lead us in prayers all the time.’
‘That’s in fun, when there’s been drinking.’
‘There’ll be drinking tonight,’ she said. ‘I can promise that.’
‘I mean it’s just play acting. What I do is just play acting.’
‘We’re all acting,’ she replied. ‘Look at me. Do you think this is who I am?’
That was exactly what he thought: that all her life she had sat upon her faded throne, massive and poor.
‘But I don’t believe any more, Annie.’
Tristan didn’t know if this was true or not. He didn’t know anything.
‘Then you must pretend,’ Annie told him, immovable as ever. ‘What sort of barbarian doesn’t pretend, in a time of death?’
‘Why does there have to be death?’ Tristan replied, knowing at once how foolish he sounded.
‘I don’t know, Tristan. What did Augustine say?’
‘It’s not what I mean.’
‘What are you saying?’ Fat Annie’s eyes darted away. He’d never seen them do that before.
‘Why do we just let them die?’
‘We?’
‘You then.’ Anger came on him without warning and Tristan let it flow. ‘Why not organise ourselves properly? We could find more fuel if we had a system. I walked past a building site yesterday. With twenty men we could empty it in a night and be warm for a month. It’s…this place, it’s haphazard. You just leave people to wander where they will. There is food to be had behind the restaurants, but they change their routines to foil us. If we had people watching all the time, then we’d—’
‘Shhh, boy. Shhh.’ His raised voice had brought attention to them. Annie pulled Tristan close and placed a hand across his mouth. She rocked him against her shoulder as if he was a child. The others, satisfied it was grief they had heard, turned back to the body.
‘It’s not how we do it here, Tristan,’ she whispered.
‘Why not?’ he demanded.
‘Because they are not fighters.’
‘They fight all the time.’
‘With each other, not with fate. That fight has gone out of them.’
Tristan knew there was no point. She understood where this argument would lead as well as he did. All the way back to Augustine and the free will they could no longer believe in. Annie rubbed his back and her voice softened.
‘I could try what you say, Tristan, but how long do you think it would last? One week maybe, or two, before it fell apart. Do you think that’s what they need right now, more hope followed by failure?’
‘So you offer hopelessness instead?’
‘I don’t offer anything, Tristan. They come to me.’
‘You can’t just accept this,’ Tristan said.
‘We all die, Tristan. The believer and the nonbeliever alike.’
‘No. You’re wrong. You make us sound like animals. We’re not. We’re not just animals!’ It wasn’t her argument, he knew that, but there was no one else he could throw it at.
‘No, Tristan, we’re not just animals. Look at your friend. Look at William.’
Tristan turned back to the group. Where others stood awkwardly, half turned from the corpse, hoping to hide in a sputtering conversation, William had eyes only for his fallen friend. It was over an hour since Tim’s heart had stopped, yet William remained perched at the edge of the couch, his long frame unfolded over his friend, his warm cheek resting on the cold face of death. Tristan watched a bony hand move slowly across Tim’s face, stroking an eyebrow, the nose, the lips.
‘Come on,’ Annie whispered. ‘Get your prayers ready. A brother needs burying.’
That night Tristan performed the first of the season’s burial ceremonies. Uttering prayers he barely believed over men he hardly knew was to become his special role. They dug holes when they could but the winter ground was hard and for every man on the shovel another was needed to stand guard, watching for the authorities, who insisted on taking corpses away for burning. When the grave was ready word would spread and the mourners would arrive: sometimes as many as thirty, other times a smaller, sadder number.
No two funerals were the same. Drink, old enmities, even the weather could nudge the story from its path. Still a ritual of sorts emerged. Someone, usually but not always a friend, would attempt to take on the voice of the deceased and tell his favourite story. There was drinking, naturally, and often a fight. More than once an enthusiastic mourner climbed down into the hole and had to be dragged back amongst the living. Eventually the energy would seep from the gathering just as it had seeped from the departed, and Tristan would recite the prayers. Then those who knew the deceased best would drop a few of his favourite things onto the body: a flask perhaps, a syringe, a battered copy of a book he had carried, once even the body of a small dog— the donor swore it had not been sacrificed for the ceremony but nobody believed him. Some insisted on a tradition they claimed had its roots in antiquity and pissed on the body before filling the hole back in.
No ceremony took place without Fat Annie’s contribution, usually a short eulogy in which she displayed a remarkable ability to remember the departed as they would have wished to be remembered. Annie was the tugging mass at the centre of their makeshift world and they couldn’t imagine it turning without her.
But it did.
Tristan woke shivering. It had become his habit to lie beside Annie, for warmth, he told himself, but this morning the great lump had turned cold. At first he registered only that there was something wrong: noises and shadows his sleepy mind couldn’t piece together. Dazzling white shafts diffracted through the ventilation slots; shouting jostled in the air. Tristan rose slow and muddle-headed, aware that the noise was getting closer. By the time he had gained his senses a terrible wailing was pulsing through the emptiness.
He turned back to Annie and saw death painted on her face. Her lips had turned thin and dry, and her wide eyes were empty of understanding. Instinctively Tristan wrapped his arms around her. Just when he had come to believe he had nothing left to lose, here he was, falling again.
It took them a full day to agree on a course of action. They could all claim to be Annie’s friend, and that left everything open to disagreement. William perhaps was the closest to her but he was reluctant to assert his privileges. She had shown Tristan a special regard, it was true, but he was too recent an arrival. Some turned to Little Cam, the remaining purrer, but all he had to offer was his fervent wish to take her place in the hole.
They all understood that when they buried Annie they would bury their fragile peace, and the funeral negotiation became a cautious, trustless affair.
They talked themselves to drink and eventually sleep, with Fat Annie’s body cold on the ground. The next morning one of the men made good a drunken promise and returned with a work gang to which he had once belonged. They used a jackhammer to break up the concrete where she lay. The idea was to make a mausoleum of their shabby home. The workers left them to dig the hole. It took a team of ten the rest of the morning. Then they levered her into her grave.
There was much anguish and accusation when Fat Annie landed heavily, face-down, offering the world her preposterous rump in farewell. The brawl between those who wished to turn her and those who wished to leave her as she lay was fierce and they were lucky not to have needed a second grave. The turners won the battle, but lost the war; Fat Annie’s weight and the snugness of the fit foiled their attempts to move her.
Mourners came from all around, and by the middle of the afternoon hundreds filled the basement. The vagrant army shuffled through the space like penguins; without prompting they had happened upon a system of spiralling that ensured each a turn at the centre to gaze on the body. Tristan moved through the warmth and stench with William at his side. Even if he had wanted to escape he couldn’t have. The crowd moved as one, unwinding its grief as the day ran down.
Five times Tristan found himself at the centre and each time the hole had changed a little: tokens dropped, regathered, stolen, rearranged. On the third pass he noted that the body had been turned. Later, they would all swear no one saw her moved, that a miracle had occurred.
There was no ceremony because they had not been able to agree on the details. Somewhere in the shrunken hours the crowd began to thin. People left without farewell just as they had arrived without welcome. The only ones still circling were those with nowhere else to go. Little Cam walked a circuit beside Tristan and when they reached the open grave he said, ‘Do you think there should be a prayer now?’
Tristan looked at the boy then down to Annie. He knew no words to bring her fleshy face back from the dirt.
‘Would you like one?’
‘Yes, please.’
There were fewer than twenty people left in the basement and the sound of the prayer drew them together. Tristan spoke the words slowly, automatically, feeling only their echoing emptiness:
Lord, you teach us that in death you embrace us. In trial you carry us, in uncertainty you guide us and in sorrow you comfort us. We ask you now to embrace our friend Annie, as she embraced life. We ask you to welcome her into your home and to give us the strength to live in a world of loss, a world held together by your great love. We cannot know your ways, Lord, but we ask for the courage to accept your plan for us. For the woman we knew, we thank you, and for the hope you offer us, we thank you. Amen.
A long silence was broken by the clang of a shovel on concrete and they began filling the hole. William approached Tristan.
‘You need to take over now,’ William said. ‘It’s what she would have wanted.’
‘No,’ Tristan replied. ‘There is nothing left here. It is finished.’
‘What will you do?’ William asked.
‘I don’t know.’ As he spoke the words Tristan felt his sadness grow heavy within him. ‘I have never known.’
Tristan’s head throbbed and his vision, still without colour, held its focus only in moments before returning him to a world of floating debris. Talking had become a terrible drain but there was no denying the story’s momentum. He took her hand. Soon she would push him away.
‘I don’t know if you will understand what happened next.’
‘Try me.’
‘Sometimes you think you understand a thing—you can turn it into words and the words seem to make sense—but then true understanding arrives, and you realise that all you’d ever seen before was the shadow of the idea. Death was not new to me, and I understood that even Annie would one day return to dirt. But to see her there, so completely reduced, when only a day before it had been impossible to imagine our world without her…
‘Something left me then. Not hope, but the thing hope rests upon. Belief. William walked away without saying goodbye, as if he had already sensed I was gone. I watched the shovels of dirt land heavily on her body and I felt nothing. I was nothing. I had nothing. I drifted into the path of the oncoming day.
‘For three days I staggered through the streets. I stopped eating. I was fading into certainty. You know those streets, you know how full of life they are, but I couldn’t see it. All I could see was a thousand balls, each rolling through the maze: people reduced to movement, movement reduced to pattern. The rector had tried to explain it to me, but even at my lowest moment I hadn’t properly understood. Not until those slow dying days, when the knowledge became a part of me. I would have died. There is no doubting it. I walked without eating or drinking, but the physical fatigue was such a small part of my pain that I barely noticed it.
‘And then I saw you.’
‘I don’t remember,’ she said. There had been a change in her silence. As if she sensed how close she was to knowledge.
‘There was nothing about me you would have noticed. I was just another beggar fallen on the far side of a street you had no business in. I could see, though, from the way you walked, that you had fallen too.’
‘When was it?’
‘Three days ago.’
There was pause as she struggled to remember. ‘It was raining,’ she said.
‘This was before the rain. It was afternoon.’
‘I was going to work.’
‘I know. I followed you. I didn’t mean to. But there was no mistaking you, even at that distance. My heart lurched in the familiar way, a distant, nostalgic sensation I was too thick-headed to make sense of. I left my few possessions on the street wrapped in a blanket, and I followed you.’
‘You should have called out.’
‘It’s becoming our theme,’ he said, but neither of them smiled.
‘I’m sorry,’ Tristan continued. ‘I don’t know if I can explain this. I walked helplessly along the path you laid. Slowly, as if fighting my way through mud. My mind was sticky with the memory of another night in another world, when I should have…But I’d stopped believing in should.
‘A strange thing happened as I walked behind you. For the first time in days my fragmented self moved with a single purpose. No, not a purpose, a yearning. A memory. You found your place beneath the canopy just before the rain came. I was huddled in an alley opposite. I whimpered when you removed your coat. A rat beneath a pile of boxes scurried at the sound, instinct taking it deeper into the maze.
‘Do you remember the car that stopped? It was long and black with silver spokes in its wheels. I didn’t see him, but I shouted as you drove away. “Don’t hurt her, you bastard,” I called out like a madman.
‘As the car moved off, I felt as if the last piece of the puzzle was sliding into place. You turned a corner and disappeared from view, and my life turned rigid again. I did not move, I could not move, but I thought of him, the stranger in the car with money in his pocket and flesh on his mind. I had never properly met you, we had never spoken, and yet I knew that if he harmed you I would hunt him down. Just imagining it filled me with a rage that could never fade to forgiveness.
‘And that, that single realisation, completes the puzzle. Do you see ? Do you understand?’
Tristan waited but Grace gave no sign of having heard the question. He did not blame her. It had taken him too long to see it as well.
‘Remember what the rector told me? If none of us is responsible, then none of us is past forgiveness. He had planted it there, don’t you see, the solution to my conundrum. Only the free act can be unforgivable. I stood alone on a wet street and watched you drive away, and I finally understood. To commit the unforgivable act is to be free. And it wasn’t too late. It’s never too late.’
His words tumbled together, a muddy mash of reason and desperation. You are crazy, she would be thinking. You have lost your mind. But that was the opposite of the truth. It was the exact opposite.
‘I did not have a car, or the money to pay for one. But I had an obsession and I would not be denied. The suit I’m wearing belongs to a businessman who swims each morning at the public pool. The car is hired under his name. That part wasn’t difficult. The difficult part comes now. The difficult part is in the explaining.’
She had gone still beside him but he knew she was listening. For a moment he felt powerful again. A fierceness came over him, a kind of determination he had experienced only once before. It was happening.
‘You are it, Grace. You are my destiny. From the moment I first saw you I knew this simple truth. When the car pulled away, the fear of you being harmed found its way to my core. I could never conceive of it, Grace. I could never even think of hurting you.’
‘Do not say it.’
‘To hurt you would be unforgivable. I could no more doubt this than I could doubt the existence of my own hand. And that is how I could prove him wrong.’
‘You are mad. This is the talk of a madman!’
‘I did not choose you, Grace. Fate chose you. And I chose to deny my fate.
‘I drove the block twice tonight, the first time just to look at you, the second to harden my resolve. You could not have guessed at the mighty urges that clawed and writhed within me. I smiled at you. You smiled back and my heart soared. I wanted to save you. I wanted to save us both.
‘I chose the road carefully. I drove it earlier today: I needed to be sure. The corners came fast, each folding into the next, pushing back a little harder. It is addictive, the thrill of speed, approaching that point where skill and danger are delicately balanced. I heard your breathing quicken with my heart. You wanted to speak out, to ask me to slow down. But you did not. As if it was written. As if you knew.
‘I felt my history rising up against me, urging me to caution. I beat it back. I have never faced a more daunting opponent but my resolve was strong. I denied my love for you. I say “I” but now we see the word is no longer adequate. I speak of something more, of will alone. It pulled at the wheel, fought against the road. The car lost traction. I accelerated. Did you feel it? There was no ice.
‘I meant to commit the unforgivable act, Grace. I meant to kill us both.’
‘But you didn’t kill me,’ she said. ‘I am still here.’
Tristan took her throat in his hands and felt it soften beneath his thumbs. He pressed down, feeling the corrugations of her windpipe, experimenting with its elasticity. She stared grey-faced back at him, treating him at last to the hatred he had earnt.
‘So this is how you do it, is it?’ she hissed. He pushed harder, and she made no move to fight him. ‘You would rather choke an argument than counter it.’
‘You have no argument,’ he said.
‘I do. You’re just not willing to hear it.’
He loosened the pressure; her rasping was too terrible to bear.
‘We all know we will die, Tristan,’ she said. ‘Dying doesn’t frighten me. But I always thought it would be for something more noble than one man’s vanity.’
He closed his one good eye against her accusation.
‘You won’t do it,’ Grace taunted, sensing the fraying of him.
‘Why won’t I?’
He looked at her again. Her lip curled back, revealing the gap in her teeth. She snarled.
‘Let me go, Tristan. Let me go. It’s not too late.’
‘Too late for what?’
‘Learning from our mistakes.’
‘I am not mistaken,’ he insisted.
‘So why are you shaking?’
‘Talk and I will listen,’ he said, regretting at once the bargain. But how could he demand she stop talking when all he craved was the sound of her voice? ‘But be quick. My fingers know what they must do.’
‘I cannot speak like this.’
‘Then do not speak.’ He pushed harder, tasting blood in his mouth, his throat, his imagination. She spat at him. He felt its warmth slide thickly on his cheek.
‘I hate you for this.’
‘You should,’ he replied. ‘You must.’
She leaned into him and he felt her weight straining against his fingers. Her face was too close for him to make out any more than her burning eyes.
‘Do you think any but the St Augustine’s student thinks twice about the nature of his will?’ she challenged. ‘Do you think there are any others who have the luxury of giving a shit? I knew a girl on the street called Francis. She died of a cough because she couldn’t afford medicine. Each evening she faced the same choice: whether or not to risk the cold of the streets in search of the money that might keep at bay the symptoms of that coldness. I sat with her as she died and she described snippets of her childhood. Not once was her fading mind troubled by Augustine’s stupid paradoxes. But now you lie here with your fingers to my throat, seeking to make some college boy’s point that means nothing to either of us. And all because you were too frightened to talk to me. If I die now it is only because you are a coward.’
He bit his tongue, whether hard enough to make it bleed he could not tell. All was blood now. All was pain.
‘He knew!’ Tristan roared, so loud that it felt as if his own throat might be shredded by it, but she did not recoil. He shook her head and heard the dull thud of bone on metal. She stared back, refusing to be moved by his tantrum. ‘Before I decided, he knew how I would decide! How can that not matter? How can that not be the end of us?’
‘You said it yourself!’ she screamed in return, as if hoping her voice might pierce his certainty. ‘You used the word. Decided. You still decided. You made a choice. A choice between two paths.’
‘But one of them wasn’t open to me.’
‘I don’t know what that means,’ she said. ‘And neither do you.’
‘It means it was never going to happen.’
She rolled her eyes and her disdain triggered a moment of uncertainty in him.
‘And what would it be like,’ she challenged, ‘this world where alternative paths remained open even after the event had happened? It is incoherent. And now you want to kill me because you hope it will let you believe in a world neither of us can even imagine?’
His felt her words vibrating through his hands. The argument surprised him. Not its vigour—who wouldn’t defend their right to breathe—but its subtlety. It unsettled him that a lifetime’s learning could be met so easily by an untrained mind.
‘There is a difference.’ His voice was shaking and he felt his hands tighten, urging its silence. Tears stung his eyes. He did not want this, he did not want it done. ‘The rector knew my mind before I knew it myself. I felt I was choosing the path, but the path had already chosen me. That is my point.’
‘Then your point is hollow,’ Grace said. ‘Where is the loss in behaving in a way that is predictable? The finest people I have ever met have been the most predictable. It speaks of their character, that in the face of life’s challenges their values still shine through. You shrink from predictability when you should aspire to it.’
‘There is no point in aspiring to anything,’ Tristan replied, ‘if success or failure is determined in advance.’
‘And what is the alternative to this determinism?’ she screamed. ‘You said it, Tristan. The alternative is disorder. You can be wilful or you can be free. You told me that. And now you choose chaos over purpose, death over love.’
From the first time he had seen her this had been her way. She could reshape the world before his eyes, making every familiar thing strange.
‘So how are we any different from the balls in the cradle?’ Tristan asked. ‘Tell me that.’
His hands shook so violently he wasn’t sure he could control them. He saw the grotesque swelling of his knuckles, and couldn’t believe they were part of him. But he did not tighten his grip. He waited for her to answer. He wanted her to answer.
‘We are different,’ Grace said, ‘because of the stories we tell ourselves, and the stories we tell each other. They contribute as much to our trajectories as the physics of our collisions. You and I are stuck here because of the stories your teachers told you. We are here because of the God you cannot stop believing in.’
‘God is no part of my argument.’
‘He is your whole argument,’ she returned, ‘and I am your sacrifice. Don’t you see? All the philosophy they taught you, it’s just a game. An exercise in being clever, in twisting your thoughts into ever more elaborate patterns. But those games belong behind the walls of the monasteries and universities. To bring them out into the world is a kind of insanity.’
‘That is a shallow argument.’
‘You are right: I argue in favour of shallowness. I make choices, Tristan; so do you. I know this as clearly as I know the feel of rain on my face or the bright glare of sunshine. You have made the will disappear in the way a conjurer makes a rabbit vanish, and it is insanity to believe your own trickery. There is no magic in the world. There is no God. There is you and there is me and this car turned on its roof and above us, I would wager, some slab of rock obscuring us from view, because it is light now and if anyone on the road was to spot us it would have already happened. So kill me if you must, but don’t think it makes you any more free. It can never be right, Tristan, that I should die for your vanity.’
He squeezed again, throttling her words, sending her into a spasm of choking. Her eyes bulged, lost and terrified. Again he relented and she coughed blood down at the ceiling. He could not do it. He could not kill the thing he loved. Defeat settled on him. He could not look at her.
‘He was right,’ Tristan muttered. ‘I am not free.’
He heard her slump against the side of the car. He could feel her shaking and he thought he heard her crying. He wanted to hold her. He wanted his past back. He wanted her.
Tristan listened to the music of the world, the rise and fall of the wind, the insistent percussion of his heart, and somewhere in the distant world the small uncertain melody of a bird that held no opinion on their predicament. He listened to her breathing, slow again, and wondered at the strangeness of love that even now brought such joy at the sound of her recovering.
‘You are free, Tristan,’ she whispered. ‘I can show you.’
‘Don’t,’ he told her. ‘Let the argument lie now. You have won.’
‘Not yet,’ she replied. ‘We are still trapped.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘You say the choices we face are not real, but how about this one? If we stay here, there is a chance no one will see us. Perhaps one day they will come searching for their car, but we will be dead by then. Or I may be wrong. It may be just that no driver has looked down this way, or the sun is not yet high enough in the sky to mark our colour out amongst the rocks. Perhaps salvation is nearer than we dare hope.
‘But we have tumbled this car before and we can do it again. If the drop to the bottom is small it won’t hurt us more and it might move us to a place where we can be seen. If the fall is great then we will die trying to save ourselves. And that is a choice, isn’t it? Imperfect, as all choices are, but how can you say we are not free when right now our future depends on it?’
He said nothing. He had no answer.
‘So what do we do? Do we wait and hope, or do we try to rock the car from its resting place? This is not fate, Tristan. Nothing is determined and there is no rector here to tell us which way you will jump. There is just you and me, and life and death. You can reduce it to physics if you want to, but I will still ask you what you want to do and you must still tell me. This is life, Tristan, yours and mine, the whole game resting on a simple choice, imperfect and constrained, as all choices are. Whether we live or die depends on this decision and there is nobody else here to make it for us.’
She paused, waiting for Tristan’s response. He had nothing.
‘You cannot argue we are not free, Tristan. Freedom is all we have. What do you want to do? Tell me and I will do it.’
Tristan laughed, a sudden release that took him by surprise, and she laughed too. Their monstrous sounds filled the cabin, a cackling bloody echo—two souls moved to a point past caring. Tristan felt the pain of his shaking body, but he couldn’t stop it. Delirium took hold and he offered no resistance.
Tristan felt light again. He reached out his hand and she met his fingertips with her own.
‘What will it be?’ she whispered.
Tristan considered the choice. He felt a tightening at his temples, the great vice of self-pity.
‘I am frightened,’ he said, hoping that naming the thing might diminish it, but his fear leaped at the word, inflating it to impossible proportions. ‘I don’t want to die.’
He waited.
‘This is where you tell me we’re not going to die,’ he said.
‘Do we wait here or do we move the car?’ she pressed.
‘It is not for me to decide.’
‘One of us must.’
Tristan’s mind froze, his thoughts caught on a Mobius strip of intention and denial. He turned away from the decision hoping that it might resolve itself without him. Nothing. He looked at Grace, seeing for the first time how young she was. Hers was the face of a child waking from a nightmare, seeking out its parent. The decision was his.
The future split in two before him, each path lined with hope and shaded by death. He closed his eyes and waited. Slowly, surely, the decision settled over him. He breathed it in, until he and the decision were one.
‘We do it,’ he whispered to her. ‘We move the car.’
‘Are you waiting for me?’ Grace asked.
‘Yes.’
‘I’m waiting for you.’
‘It could take a while then.’
‘Yes.’
‘Is there something we should say, do you think?’ Tristan asked.
‘A prayer?’ she replied.
‘I don’t know. Isn’t there one last thing you want to tell the world?’
‘It’s not a last thing. They’ll see us. They’ll come.’
‘So we are to die in denial?’
‘It’s how we live.’
She took his hand. Her fingers crushed his knuckles.
They began to rock together, so slowly that at first he was not sure it had begun. His body moved with hers. The car shifted its weight. He heard metal stressing beneath him, and felt the softness of her body melting into his. He pushed back.
‘More!’
She crushed into him. He resisted, bracing with his legs. He let go, screaming now as she was, seeking out every last scrap of rage.
Suddenly she was on top of him, then he on her.
They were floating, tumbling together in a machine not made for tumbling, weightless and free. He considered the physics: gravity recast as acceleration. An odd thought to have, but what thought isn’t odd when death breathes close and sticky? The world slowed. He looked at her. They were free.