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Small. She’d barely reach his shoulder. Short tufts of bleached hair. Dark eyes, blue and quick. A delicate chin. So slim that he knew that if he were to trace a finger along her spine he would feel every tendon and bone and muscle of her. Knew the touch, already, of her skin.
‘Love? What do you want, Love?’ The barmaid stuck her bearded chin in Frank’s direction and he asked her for three pints. By the cigarette machine she stood amongst the barking crowds as if in an empty room and somewhere, somehow, a glam-rock paedo screamed on too fast. Frank sipped his pint and watched as she was approached by a tall, spiky looking redhead and a chubby brunette. She smiled, then, the girl. A smile that seemed to flood her face with light.
The hiss and thump of the needle in the grooves.
Time to go back. Put another record on. Sort it out, Frank. Not till she looks at me. Not till she turns round and looks at me. Tony the Turk with his sick, dwarfy legs steaming towards him, oily hair glistening red, blue, green in the disco lights. This is not what he paid Frank for, no way. Come on Frankie, gotta get going, move it. (But just … look at me. Look at me first.) In mid conversation she half turned her shoulders, this stranger, lifted her chin, scanned the bar, searching for something. Searching for someone. Found him. Found his eyes, lifted her chin. Held him. Held him there, right there, in her gaze. When does love start?
Back at the decks Jim and Eugene, pissed and stoned and deep in inane conversation and fucking useless as they always were had not noticed, were the only people who had not noticed that the evening’s musical entertainment was, and had been for some minutes, absent. Frank fought his way through the crowd again, past two kids swapping cash for drugs and a middle-aged woman passed out upon a table, and dropped a Beyoncé track on the turntable. The dance floor refilled instantly. Easily pleased, was the Mermaid’s clientele. The night sped on, the place filled out, Frank’s records keeping the dance floor rammed and the atmosphere about as good as the atmosphere ever got there. The three girls stayed by the bar meanwhile, a hundred eyes landing on them like rain, the brunette and the redhead porous, thirsty.
As he watched her, the hectic squalor of the Mermaid seemed to recede to a meaningless blur. She was dressed in a simple skirt and T-shirt, unfashionable plimsolls on her feet, her closely cropped hair a yellow cap. The hard-faced pair next to her, the noise and flashing lights were just a monochrome haze against which she stood out in sharp, vivid relief. And as his gaze traveled over the small triangle of her face, the almost supernaturally large blue eyes, the slender neck, he felt almost as if her were touching her.
It didn’t take her friends long to notice Eugene. It rarely took any woman long to notice Eugene. The effect was instant, like kindling under flame and Frank smiled at their sudden animation, the volley of glances that flew past him to where Euge stood, oblivious and drunk, with Jimmy. For the next hour, Frank played his records, keeping one eye on the girl, the other on the ebb and flow of the pub. The usual Friday-night mess of east-end geezers with their shit coke and their mean-eyed women drinking cheap cocktails, and he wondered what she was doing there, what it meant. After a while he spotted his friends amongst the dancers, Jimmy pogo-ing out of time to the music, bellowing happily at the brunette’s chest. Eugene chatting up the redhead, his eyes gleaming with either lust or booze. Frank wondered what had taken them so long.
And there she was, his girl. Stood slightly apart, a half-smile on her lips. And when suddenly she looked up and turned her eyes on him again he knew with a shock of certainty that he would hold that image of her, in the smoky flashing gloom of the Mermaid, glass half raised, the sudden, full, frank, petrol-blue gaze of her eyes on his. He knew he would look back on that image one day many years from now as the night he first saw the girl whose name he didn’t yet know.
‘How’s it going old son?’ It was two a.m., the Mermaid almost empty. Frank knelt on the floor packing up his records. He looked up to see Jimmy’s flushed face peering down at him.
‘Those birds are coming back with us,’ he grinned. ‘That dark-haired one’s a right laugh. Eugene’s tucking into the ginge already, lucky bastard. Think you might be stuck with their mate though is the only thing. She don’t say fuck all, but as you know,’ he winked, ‘that usually means they go like a frog in a sock.’
Frank nodded, but continued kneeling for a moment, staring needlessly into his record bag, the realization that he was seconds away from talking to her freezing him to the spot. Finally he hauled his gear onto his shoulder and then reached down again to pick up his headphones. When he straightened, she was standing in front of him.
She smiled. ‘I’m Kate,’ she said. ‘Do you want some help with that?’
The driver who took them home to south-east London turned the volume up on his radio, trying to drown his passengers out with LBC. Kate and Frank sat alone in the back seat of the people carrier, a silent audience to their friends in front who were noisily making their way through a hefty spliff and a bottle of whisky blagged from the bar.
And there they were, as simple as that. He could feel the soft weight of her leg against his, the heat of her shoulder on his arm. She continued to stare straight ahead, the same half-smile fluttering across her mouth, the air between them taut with possibility. Desperately he searched his mind for a topic of conversation but it remained blank. The silence lengthened. Panic shifted queasily in his gut. He was never normally like this with girls. Bit by bit that brief, sweet moment when their eyes had met in the bar receded. Why could he think of absolutely nothing to say?
She shifted her weight slightly and now her thigh burned through his jeans. His gaze fell to her hands, folded in her lap. The cab stopped at a light and he looked out at the black and yellow street, fighting the impulse to open the door and throw himself under the wheels of the nearest night bus – anything but this. The light turned green. The car growled and lurched. Come on, Frank: say something. She continued to stare ahead, her eyes revealing nothing. Anything, say anything. Frank pushed his hands beneath his knees and wondered when it was exactly that he’d turned into such a prick.
The cab sped on across Waterloo Bridge. He cleared his throat as if to speak and she turned to him expectantly, while the words died instantly in his throat. The air between them thickened, the world seemed to hold its breath in anticipation. But the silence lengthened, the tension withered and at last she looked away. With a sinking heart he watched her gaze out at the floodlit buildings of the South Bank, the fuzzy, neon reflections strewn across the black river like the trails of fireworks. Soon they would be there and his chance would have passed. He was an idiot.
The car approached the Elephant. In no time they were in Deptford.
Too late. Too late.
He called to the driver to stop. Clambered awkwardly through the car, treading on the foot of the redhead who was sprawled across Eugene’s lap, and almost falling onto the brunette, her hand on Jimmy’s thigh. ‘I’ll see you later, yeah?’ he said. He had bottled it and he couldn’t bear to look at her now.
‘What you doing?’ protested Jimmy. ‘Come back to mine!’
Eugene nodded through a cloud of smoke. ‘You gotta come back, man. Come and party.’
‘I’m just dropping my records off,’ he lied soothingly. ‘I’ll come round after.’ He got out of the car, tried to think of how to say goodbye to her, could only manage a brief smile, disappointment clutching at his throat. Fuck it. It was only after he’d unloaded his bags and the car had sped away that he turned and saw her standing beneath the fuzzy orange glow of a street lamp.
‘I thought I might keep you company,’ she said, her voice quiet, precise.
She had the most vivid face he’d ever seen, he thought. No make-up but full, red lips, a patch of pink high on each cheek, her eyes dark blue, speckled black. Dense and quick, like water running over rocks.
‘Are we going in, then?’ Amused, expectant.
‘Oh,’ said Frank. ‘Yeah. Sorry. It’s this one.’
He unlocked his front door and realized by the smell that he’d forgotten to take the bins out again. She followed him along the dark, cramped hallway to the lounge. The overhead bulb had gone, and he crashed around for a few seconds trying to locate the lamp.
He cringed when the light eventually revealed the chaos of his lounge. He hadn’t done anything to the house since moving in three years ago apart from install a large sound system. There was a smell of damp, and leaky gas fire. A green, flowered carpet cringed beneath purple wallpaper. The furniture was sparse, had seen better days. But the worse thing, he decided, the very worse thing was that everything – every inch of space: the floor, the table, the sofa, the shelves – was covered in piles of records. Twelve-inch and seven-inch black, shiny orbs, naked or half-dressed in white paper sleeves or peeping out from colourful, cardboard covers. It was like a bizarre kind of record shop that had recently been burgled, he realised. He looked over at Kate, who stood surveying the room from the door.
‘Interesting … décor,’ she said, a smile like a bird’s wing brushing her lips.
‘Yeah,’ said Frank. ‘Sorry. Bit of a dump. It was my Aunt Joanie’s. I inherited it from her a few years back and I never got round to, er –’ He rubbed his face and glancing at her, fell silent.
‘You’ve done wonders with the place,’ she laughed, and watched as he began picking up records from the floor and the sofa, making space for her to sit.
‘You like music.’
He smiled. ‘Yeah,’ he agreed. ‘I like music.’ What was he going to do with her now, now that she was here?
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, after a short silence. ‘About your aunt. Were you close?’
Frank shrugged, nodded. ‘I suppose we were.’ He continued to shift piles of records from one space to the next.
‘Come and sit down.’ She’d taken her jacket off, and he could see the goose pimples on her thin arms. He could not remember when he had last felt so nervous. And what was it about her voice? It was incredible, he thought, like music. When she stopped talking it was as if that final word hung in the air afterwards like the last note of a song, his ears stretching after it in the silence that followed.
They stared at each other for a moment. ‘Coffee,’ he said abruptly, and left the room.
In the pitch-black hall on the way to the kitchen, he tripped over another box of records and told it he was sorry. As he made the coffee and crashed through some washing up, his mobile buzzed repeatedly in his back pocket. Jimmy and Eugene, he supposed, and turned it off. His kitchen smelt of bad fridge. From the next room, he heard her put a record on. A Bowie track, Life On Mars.
When he returned she was standing by the window. She didn’t notice him for a second or two, and he stood, poised in the threshold, looking at her slender neck bent over the record sleeve she held. He wondered what her skin smelt like. She turned to him then, and he felt himself flush with pleasure at her smile, momentarily dazzled. She put down the record and walked towards him.
Carefully, she took the mugs from his hands and put them on the table. She led him to the sofa, gently pulling him until he was sitting next to her. She reached for his face and drew it closer to hers and then grazed his mouth with her lips. Frank scarcely breathed. Next she kissed his brow, his cheek, his eyes, and, finally, his mouth again, her tongue flickering between his lips. Frank put his hand on her back, his long fingers tracing the dips and hollows of her ribs, pulling her closer to him. In the silence they kissed and he felt himself respond with a mad exhilaration as if he’d just stepped off a cliff.
The coffee went cold, the record came to an end. She took his hand and led him into the dark hall, then up the narrow staircase as if she’d been there many times before. In the doorway of his bedroom they stopped to gaze in at the room that like his lounge was strewn with records. Kate moved first. Lightly kicking the Stones from her path she led him to the bed, still holding Frank’s hand she stepped neatly over the Kinks. With one arm she swept Aretha Franklin off the duvet, and sitting down next to John Coltrane she pulled Frank towards her. Letting go of his hand, she tugged her T-shirt over her head, and pushing Frank back onto the bed, she kissed him again.
three (#ulink_2624ef95-9793-52e7-bc6f-c13024aa1edc)
Normandy, France, 10 April 1985
Nobody really knew the man who lived in the forest, and the few who were acquainted with him knew him only as ‘the mute’. He would arrive in his rusty blue pick-up truck at a store in one of the villages some distance from the Forêt de Breteuil, and the shop owners who served him would be struck by a distant memory of the peculiar weight of his silence. And as they helped him take his provisions to the truck or collected money for his petrol, they would feel sure, suddenly, that they had served him once before, one day long ago.
Their conversation would be met with a pleasant, apologetic smile and the silent man would raise a single, bony finger to his mouth and sadly shake his head. Then he would pull from his pocket a note pad and write down his order, and the shop keeper would be struck by the frank sweetness of his gaze, would watch him drive away, wonder briefly who he was and where he lived, before shrugging and turning back to their day.
The young woman who worked in the charity shop in Argentan, however, had never seen the man before. Wham blared loudly from the radio and she was busy on the phone when the tall, grave stranger with the shy smile and slight stoop handed her the amount she had absent-mindedly rung up on the till. And so, ten years later, when the same man’s body had been found in a forest twenty miles away, and when a picture of his face flashed across TV screens around the world, the young woman, whose name was Laure, would not remember that this was the same, silent person who had once bought bags and bags of clothes one afternoon a decade ago, for a toddler, for a child, for a young girl.
four (#ulink_b918359a-6860-508a-8342-94d38f1ec3a0)
Forêt de Breteuil, Normandy, 1985
Her old life is soon forgotten, here amongst the trees. She’s almost three. At first she babbles the few baby sentences she has learnt, but when the man does not reply, language too, is lost. There are no words in the forest. Hot sun and cool rain and freezing ice come and go and then return again, and her mother’s smell and touch and voice, her home, everything is forgotten, the wind takes all that with it as it rushes and bellows and whips between the beeches and oaks, over the river, escaping through the snatching leaves, out, out of the forest, leaving her behind.
The small stone cottage is little bigger than a shack with two small rooms, a leaking roof, a narrow bed on either side of the wide hearth. Dense woodlands surround it, the nearest road eight miles away is only rarely used by passing truckers on their way to somewhere else.
The years pass. In the winter the forest is still and melancholy. The tree trunks rise black and gaunt from the snow like bones, only a few desiccated leaves remain, dead but not fallen. In the winter the cottage is thick with heat from the fire and the smell of stew cooking above the flames. They sit and eat and watch the burning wood, while outside, dense and black, the night sits and waits, sits and waits.
Spring returns and a new softness begins to creep across the shadows. Saplings rise from the barren ground. The trees, slowly at first, begin to sprout their buds. And then the pulse of the forest begins to gather speed, beating louder and stronger until almost all at once the trees are alive with noise and colour. A pale, green light creeps between the trees. The river flows thick with fish and the bracken rustles with deer, hares, squirrels, badgers, boar. The branches stir with birdsong.
When she is five the man makes a fishing rod for the child and teaches her to fish. Side by side they sit on the riverbank, waiting patiently for the tell-tale tug on the end of their lines. He shows her where to look for berries and where the wild garlic grows. She watches, delighted, as effortlessly he splits logs with his axe and builds for her a see-saw. He is stronger and taller than all the trees.
Soon she’s entrusted with her own chores and each morning she tends the vegetable patch, checks the animal traps and fetches eggs from the coop, proudly bringing him her spoils. Later, she will watch in unblinking admiration as his quick, agile fingers expertly skin a rabbit, making light work of its glistening pink flesh and transforming the once hopping, furry thing into a hot and tasty meal. At night after they have eaten and she has grown sleepy by the fire, she hugs him tightly before she goes to bed and his beloved woody, smoky smell lingers in her nostrils as she drifts into sleep.
The man has shown the girl how far she’s permitted to roam. No further than the river, nor past the very end of the third clearing, behind the cottage where their vegetables grow. She could disobey him. On the rare days that he sets off in his truck and doesn’t return until after the sun has set, on these days she could run without him ever finding her. But where to, and why? Instead the hours of his absence are waited out anxiously; no sooner has the rusty blue truck disappeared from view than she begins to listen impatiently for the rumbling splutter of its return. Perched on the narrow front step or with her face pressed against the window pane she strains her ears and eyes for him, her hands clasped tightly to her chest to calm the twisting, gnawing there.
Once, when the man has been gone much longer than usual and the sun has long since set, the little girl stares out with growing dismay at the forest that seems to get blacker and denser with every passing second. At last she decides that he is never coming back for her. Panic-stricken she imagines setting out alone through the trees to look for him but she can no more picture a world beyond the forest than she can imagine a life without the man.
Eventually her anxiety forces her from the cottage and beneath the cold, silent moon she paces back and forth between the path and the river, insensible to the rain that has begun to soak her clothes and hair. And when finally he appears, struggling towards her through the darkness with a heavy sack of supplies on his shoulder, her relief is so great that it takes him some time to prise her arms from his legs, to calm her anguished sobs. He picks her up and carries her into the house, rocking her gently on his lap until at last her tears subside and she falls into an uneasy, clinging sleep.
Only once do strangers come. She is eight. The man and the little girl are by the river when voices curl their way through the trees. It’s the child who hears them first. She lifts her chin, alert suddenly, her ears straining to identify the strange new sound as words drift towards her like dandelion seeds on a breeze. And all at once something in her remembers; some small part of her stirs: a distant, half-forgotten longing rises inside her. Instinctively she gets up and moves towards the voices, towards something she hadn’t even known she’d hungered for till then. And then the man has snatched her up, is running with her towards the cottage, his hand silencing her sharp yelp of shock. Inside the tiny house he wraps a shirt around her mouth, tying it so tightly that the tears choke in her throat. He pushes her beneath the small wooden bed and pulls the blanket down until she’s in darkness, shivering on the cold stone floor. And then she hears him leave, the bolt of the door sliding heavily in its lock.
Later, when the fire’s burning in the grate and the sky outside is dark, the man sits and holds her to him and wipes away her tears. Whatever lies beyond the forest is to be feared, she’s certain of that now. She gazes up at him until the anger and hurt gradually leaves her. After a while, she reaches for his wrist and turns it to its white, fleshy underside. It’s something she has done since she was very small, has always been drawn to the soft, white skin there, such a contrast to the rest of him that is so rough and tanned or covered in swirls of hair. She traces her finger along the delicate flesh, where pale blue veins pulse beneath the whiteness. He smiles down at her. All is well again.
Every night the girl lies on her narrow bed and listens to the sound of the man sleeping on the other side of the hearth, his slow steady breath mingling with the ‘hee-wiiit’ and ‘oooo’ of the owls as they move outside on silent wings. Each morning she wakes before the first light. Quietly, while the man sleeps, she slips out of the cottage and sits on the step, waiting patiently. As soon as the first light appears the forest seems to stretch and sigh expectantly. Mist hangs heavy between the trees; a warm muskiness rises from the bracken, foxes cease their dissolute shrieking and even the gurgling river seems to pause awhile. And then, at last, it begins.
Each first, tentative note is answered by another and then another. Gradually, the simple calls are replaced by a thousand complex melodies that weave and wind around each other, building layer upon layer until the forest is swollen with sound, the trees are heavy with song, and music falls like rain from the branches of each one. The sun floats higher in the sky bathing each leaf in a soft, pink light. And the forest is transformed by birdsong: it is saturated with music and it’s magical, it’s hers. The sound grows louder and louder until it feels to the child that the whole world is drenched in melody. But then, finally, suddenly: nothing. Only a silence that is as dramatic as the symphony it has replaced. The child rouses herself and returns, satisfied, to the house and the sleeping man.
At dusk on summer’s evenings, the man and the girl sit together on a little bench in front of the cottage. While he smokes and stares thoughtfully at the fading evening light, the child performs for him the music she has learnt. From the loud, mewing ‘pee-uuu, pee-uuu’ of the buzzard, to the jangling warble of the redstart, to the warm cooing of the cuckoo and the ‘chink-chink, chink-chink’ of the blackbird, the child is able to mimic each one perfectly. Tika-tika-tika, she sings. Chiiiiiiiiiii-ew. She knows the music of every bird from the whitethroat to the kestrel to the guillemot to the lark. And the man smokes and listens, while he carves his gift to her: a little wooden starling whittled from a fallen branch.
They are happy together, the silent man and the wordless child. The days and months come and go, as the seasons attack, take hold, and then recede. But in the same way that night banishes the sun, and winter crushes summer in its fist, so too does darkness come to the man. It arrives without warning and lasts sometimes days, sometimes weeks, but it seems to her that when it comes it falls with such heavy finality there will never be light again. It is as if the mud from the riverbed has crept up on him while he slept, as if its thick, black muck has seeped into his ears, his nostrils, through his mouth to choke him on its wretchedness.
At these times, the child can do nothing but watch and wait. When night falls she builds a fire and perches miserably at the man’s side while he sits, immobile in his chair, with heavy, brooding eyes. Sometimes she creeps towards him and, lifting his arm, she brings the naked underbelly of his wrist to her cheek, but when he doesn’t respond, she lets it drop listlessly to his side and returns to crouch by the fire alone. Some mornings he will not rise from his bed at all but will continue just to lie there, his knees bent almost to his chest, his face staring sightlessly at the wall.
And when finally he returns to her, emerging blinking into the sunlight as if bewildered to find the world exactly as he left it, she will go to him and take his hand and lead him to the river to fish. Later they will tend the vegetables and chickens together, and eat their supper side by side on the little bench beside the cottage while the birds begin again their evening song.
five (#ulink_d5b44489-f8cf-58be-b14e-5f19193635fc)
The Mermaid, Dalston, north London, 21 September 2003
Into the bar she walks, winding between the bodies like cigarette smoke. She’s here to celebrate her last day at the insurance firm where she’s temped for the past six months. She’s tired, would prefer to go home, but Candice and Carmen have insisted: they want to see her off in style. A Gary Glitter song screams suddenly through the room at high-speed like a rampaging gatecrasher. Kate stands by the cigarette machine and waits.
The Mermaid is packed with the sort of people discouraged from patronizing the bars and restaurants a few miles away on Upper Street where Kate, Carmen and Candice plan to head after they’ve taken advantage of the Mermaid’s 3-for-l cocktail offer. She has never been here before. It is one of those bars that has tinted windows and CCTV. Disco lights flash encouragingly from the dance floor: red, blue, yellow and green. She looks at the various groups of drinkers: the shaven-headed men in their tan leather jackets and their orange, wrinkly-cleavaged women. They each drink and talk in short sharp bursts, all the while scanning the room with restless, flickering eyes. She buys a drink and stands by the cigarette machine, waiting for her friends.
And by the bar a young man stands alone, staring at her, as if she has just called out his name.
Candice and Carmen arrive. They are fond of Kate; girls like them always are. She’s the quiet type and therefore impressed, they’re sure, by their confidence and bravado. She is unfashionably dressed, so must be envious of their TopShop clothes and long flat hair. She has no man of her own so hangs (bless her) on their tales of flirting and fucking, their one-night stands with rich city boys. She is the blank canvas on which they paint themselves in the most flattering of lights. They will miss her when she’s gone and feel vaguely outraged when she doesn’t keep in touch.
The hissing and scratching of the grooves.
She notices that the man at the bar has returned to the DJ booth and put another record on. The dance floor refills and, between the swaying bodies, she examines the three men by the decks. The tall, dark-skinned man is very beautiful; his eyes cat-like, his lips full and mournful, his fingers long and graceful. Every so often he pulls a tiny plastic vial from the pocket of his jacket and takes a sniff in a sly, furtive gesture that belies the slow, sleepy sensuousness of his face.
The man next to him is stocky, solid, and has a large, open countenance with smiling eyes. He moves in big, expansive gestures and rarely stops talking, laughs a lot and loudly and is very tactile, slapping his friends on the back or ruffling their hair. He is very sure of himself; very comfortable in his skin. He’s the sort of man, she thinks, who has probably changed little since boyhood, except perhaps for an almost imperceptible glimmer of doubt that slides at odd moments behind those keen, laughing eyes.
The third man is the man who had been staring at her by the bar and who is staring at her still. He’s dressed in shabby jeans and a pale green sweatshirt. He has an attractive, sensitive face and his slim frame is tall and slightly awkward. She sees that while his friends become increasingly drunk, there is something contained, something infinitely calm about him. She notices that his friends glance at him often, as if to reassure themselves that he is still there, that everything is as it should be. After a while, she finds herself beginning to do the same.
‘Fucking hell, Car, have you seen that bloke, there?’ Candice clutches Carmen’s arm and the two look over at the beautiful mixed-race man. Kate wonders what has taken them so long.
The night speeds up, bodies fill the dance floor, the man in the green sweatshirt upping the tempo with each song. She sees how lovingly he handles his records, how expertly he gauges the dancers’ mood. His movements are fluid, sure. In this at least, she sees, he is sure. His two friends approach Kate and her colleagues. The beautiful man tells them his name is Eugene, the stocky, smiling one is Jimmy, and he offers to buy them drinks. Kate hangs back and watches the four of them dance. She raises her glass to her lips and turns to the DJ booth to meet the third man’s soft, brown gaze full on. She holds his eyes for a long time.
In the taxi that takes them to south-east London she sees that his hands are large with bitten nails. She’s sorry when he pushes them beneath his knees, out of sight.
Standing in the doorway of his lounge in the tiny Deptford house she watches him across the chaos of the shabby, record-strewn room. As he blunders around shifting piles of vinyl she notices how the words bubble behind his eyes, come briefly to the surface only to be dismissed immediately with an uncertain smile. He clears a space for her on the sofa and she sits.
‘You like music,’ she says, after a moment or two.
‘Yeah,’ he shrugs and rubs his face. ‘I play any old shit in the Mermaid. As long as they can dance to it they don’t give a fuck. But, yeah –’ he looks around at the mess of records as if noticing them for the first time and laughs apologetically ‘– yeah,’ he says softly, ‘I like music.’
Her arms goose-pimple in the cold room. She watches him, as he hangs there awkwardly before her, trying to think of what to say next. His entire body leans forward, as if desperate for her. She senses that he wants to touch her; that every speck of him longs for that. Abruptly, though, he leaves the room, muttering something about coffee.
She goes to the sound system and picks up a record at random from one of the boxes on the floor. She doesn’t look at it as she places it on the turntable and raises the needle: she knows nothing about music. By coincidence, it’s a song she recognises. Life on Mars. She freezes, immediately shoved by the familiar tune back to a different time and place. A small, cramped room in a New York apartment. A pink nylon bedspread. A young Vietnamese boy named Bobby who is covered in bruises and who still smells of his last customer’s semen, a cheap cassette player that rattles as it plays the words, Is there life on Mars? Is there life on Mars?. Unexpected tears spring to her eyes.
She bends her head over the record sleeve and seconds later turns to see Frank standing in the door, the coffee mugs in his hands. They smile at each other and as she stands there gazing at him, she feels for the first time in a very long while that perhaps she might find peace, here, in this dark, messy house, with this tall, shy stranger, if only for one night. She feels as if she might perhaps sleep and not dream for once the same, old, terrible dream.
six (#ulink_c2564993-084d-547e-8c4d-86cbeaadf941)
Forêt de Breteuil, Normandy, 1995
The child grows taller. Her light-brown hair with its strands of red and copper falls almost to her waist. There is a new restlessness within her that was not there before. Now, when the man gets into his truck she will try to jump in too, holding on tightly to the handle until he pulls away. And when he has gone she will roam further than she ever has before, looking for something, for somewhere else, but not quite daring – not yet – to wander too far.
She is almost thirteen. In recent months something has changed between them, a shadow has crept over their contentment. Sometimes, when they sit together in front of the fire at night she will turn and catch him looking at her in a way he never has before and although the moment passes an uneasiness will continue to linger in the air between them for a little while longer, like a slithering in the undergrowth on a dark and silent night.
One evening at the end of summer she returns from the river to find the man sitting by the hearth. A small fire flickers in the grate. She pauses at the threshold of the cottage, aware immediately that something is terribly wrong. Outside in the dusk, the birds have begun their plaintive evening song and she looks longingly behind her to the twilit forest. The man turns and sees her, and motions for her to come.
When she’s seated next to him she notices that on his lap is a large wooden box she has never seen before. She wonders where it has been hidden for so long. The man’s long silent fingers rest motionless on top of it for a long moment until abruptly and without looking at her he raises the lid and pulls from it a photograph of a young woman. The child cranes forward to see it, her heart skipping with excitement at this sudden, incredible image of another human being. He passes it to her and she takes it eagerly, marvelling over the square of grainy, faded paper, scrutinizing every detail as it lies there in her hands.
The woman is wearing a long green dress and her hair is thick and dark with a heavy fringe. Her smile is shy, secretive; her eyes are lowered to her hands which are clasped neatly together in her lap. The girl takes all this in with wonder until at last she is distracted by the man opening the box for a second time.
Next he pulls out the green dress itself. It’s folded carefully, the fabric faded at the creases and it has a faint whiff of age. He hands it to the girl and indicates for her to put it on. But for a while she just sits with the dress in her lap staring down at the material as if hypnotized, her fingers absently, nervously, stroking the buttons at its neck. And though she doesn’t raise her eyes she feels the air between the two of them crackle with something she cannot begin to understand. At last she turns to him and sees that he is unnaturally still: he doesn’t tremble, doesn’t breathe, doesn’t drop his gaze from hers.
Obediently, she stands and pulls the garment over her head, smoothing it down over her T-shirt and shorts, hoping that the gnawing, twisting feeling beneath her ribs might disappear if she pleases him and does as he asks. But once the dress is on (the sleeves too long, the hem tumbling over her toes) and she is standing before him, her cheeks burning with something she has never felt before, she sees an expression of such pain flood his face that involuntary she gives a little cry and takes a step towards him. Just as she is about to reach for him however she falters and, confused, withdraws and takes her seat again.
A long moment passes before he gets to his feet once more and fetches the large workman scissors from his tool kit. Before she can understand what is happening he has begun to carefully chop at her hair until it matches the woman’s in the picture. He sits back down while she cautiously strokes her newly shorn locks. He continues to stare at her for a long time, and then without warning he begins to cry. She has never seen his tears before and the sight horrifies her.
They sit there, the two of them, and the minutes, the hours pass. The man does not take his eyes from her and she, in turn, does not move, can neither abandon him to his pain nor think of how to comfort him. His tears are awful to her. Night falls; the fire dies in the hearth, and still they sit. Finally, when the cottage is completely dark and she can no longer tell where he begins and the night ends, she creeps into her little bed and lies awake, her heart thumping, while the man and the night sits and waits, sits and waits.
The next morning she rises before the sun and slips from the cottage to wait for the birds. But she takes no pleasure in their song today. She remains there for a long time, long after the sun has climbed above the forest. The small carved bird sits as usual in her lap, her thumb moving over the smooth contours of its head in slow, comforting circles.
When at last she ventures back to the cottage the stone floor is streaked in sunshine. A cloud of midges hangs in the doorway. All is still. She notices that the man is stretched out upon the bed. By his side lie the scissors, their large, clumsy blades streaked in red. She creeps closer. His eyes are open, staring at the ceiling. His left arm is wrist-side up and flung almost nonchalantly from his body. There is a deep, long wound that runs the length of his inner forearm, from wrist to elbow, the flesh and the tendons torn with force by the heavy blades. The wound is so deep she can see the bone. The bed is drenched in blood. The man’s face is blue-white; he does not breathe.
She backs away to the farthest corner of the room and crouches there, her mouth wide with terror until, finally, she begins to scream. Outside, a flock of birds takes sudden flight and her cry rushes after them. Suddenly she springs from her corner, the little carved bird still clasped tightly in her fist, and she flees. Through miles of dense woodland she runs, further and further, long into the night, and the forest screams on around her.
seven (#ulink_e253825b-1371-52f7-8402-036a03b7d261)
The New York Times
