Daniel James
The world was to me a secret which I desired to divine143
I was lying in bed with Margot in the last days before I left. Before the fall. We were at her place on the east coast and had spent the weekend pretending everything was normal, even though we knew this moment couldn’t last. Tomorrow I’d get the train back to London and the Eurostar to Paris. Neither of us knew if I would be coming back.
On Friday night we danced in the kitchen, laughing and joking as we drank wine and cooked dinner. Saturday was spent in bed or the shower, washing each other’s bodies clean only to get dirty all over again minutes later. By Sunday, a sea fret had rolled in and surrounded everything. The world outside disappeared piece by piece, consumed by the mist until only the house remained. It felt like a matter of time before it crept inside, reaching around the doorframe and seeping between the cracks in the brickwork. As night fell a sense of unease haunted our every word, every gesture, every look.
Margot lay in my arms, the bed sheets stained with sex and tangled around our bodies, our clothes strewn across the floor. George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass was playing on her old turntables. Everything was still. We lay there listening until the music stopped, replaced by a ghostly crackle and something else; a low, repetitive hum coming from the lighthouse on the clifftop. It was the foghorn calling out, the sound cutting through the mist every few seconds to warn errant sailors from straying too close to the rocks.
‘Do you have to go?’ The question had been in the air all weekend, but like so many things it had been spoken too late.
‘You know I do,’ I replied.
‘Why?’
‘You don’t say no to the kind of money they’re offering.’
‘But that’s not the real reason?’
I reached over to the bedside table, picked up the tumbler and finished what was left of the Rittenhouse.
‘Are you going to take that lecturing job in Glasgow?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know,’ she replied.
We lay in silence for a moment, the only sound coming from the muffled drone of the foghorn.
I felt her hand move slowly under the bed sheets, searching for mine.
‘I always liked Glasgow,’ I said, absently. ‘Good city…friendly people.’
Her eyes were distant, and she didn’t seem to register my words.
‘Not everyone can just leave their life behind.’
I could see our doubles in the bedside mirror. Her eyes bore into my back, while mine studied our reflections as if they held the answers I sought.
‘What do you care anyway?’ she added.
‘You think I don’t care?’
I tried and failed to catch her eye in the mirror.
‘I can never tell what you’re thinking about,’ she replied.
‘The future.’
‘That would be right. Never the here and now.’
‘What’s so good about now?’
She shifted her weight and turned away from me, the warmth of her body leaving with her.
‘That’s not what I meant, Margot,’ I said.
The foghorn continued to call out. I reached for her shoulder, her long black hair trailing between us, but her skin was cold to the touch.
‘One day…’ I said, ‘…you’ll be giving a lecture in Glasgow– ’
‘I’m not going to Glasgow.’
‘ –or wherever, and you’ll see a man with dark hair and blue eyes take a seat in the back row. He’ll nod at you and smile and– ’
‘And what? I’m too old for stories, Dan.’
I watched her reflection in the mirror, as she stood up and grabbed a dressing gown from the back of the bedroom door.
‘Do you even know why you’re going?’ she added, as she wrapped the fabric around her and sat down on the bed.
I thought of the black water of the Tyne far below me, the tips of my shoes over the edge of the barrier, orange street lights shimmering in the darkness of the city. When I turned to look at her, a woman I didn’t recognise sat on the edge of the bed in Margot’s place, blonde hair where black had been, cold blue eyes replacing warm brown. Something dark bloomed inside my chest.
‘What’s wrong?’ she said.
The room seemed to tilt as I stood up. I reached for Margot’s bookcase to steady myself. My hands pressing against books I’d read a dozen times. I pulled one out. The pages were blank. Empty. I stumbled and knocked a photo of a young girl from the shelf. The frame snapped open as it hit the floor, revealing the photo to be a clipping from an advert in a newspaper. My mind reeled. It was all fake. In the mirror, Margot looked frightened and confused, her dark eyes wide, long black hair framing her face, but there was a blonde woman behind me in the room, calling my name. I turned to face her, but there was no one there. Her voice grew faint, her words caught in a loop, bathed in the crackle of time out of joint.144 She had disappeared. I stumbled over to the window and pulled the curtains apart. The mist was pressing against the glass, the window panes spider-webbed with cracks. Even the brick work was crumbling. There was nothing out there beyond the mist. Nothing. A strange feeling passed through me, an electrical current of fear to realisation , dread to acceptance. I was alone, but this wasn’t real. It wasn’t live. I was in an empty facsimile, a rerun of what might have been, mixed up with what never was, haunted by the spectres of past lives.
I closed my eyes and willed myself to wake up.
END
Notes
143. From the novel, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, published anonymously by Mary Shelley in 1818.
144. The latter phrase is seemingly a reference to Shakespeare’s Hamlet – Anonymous.