If You Knew Her

Ange has a boyfriend, a boyfriend called Craig. Strange, the simple sentence doesn't appal me, doesn't even surprise me that much. I imagine insurance man Craig, a lumpy face, the color of porridge, pulling his double chin away from the collar of a cheap polyester suit and I hope he'll succeed where I failed again and again. I wonder if he'll be able to make Ange happy, lift a life full of disappointment. I wonder if he can make Ange's mouth so often pursed as a tight knot finally loosen into a long-lost smile. I hope so. I'd like to think she could be happy; it would be good for Lucy to see her mum happy.

Most people don’t get it at all. They think they can fix things with tea and sympathy and it’s like they’re pissed off with me that they can’t; they think it’s my fault somehow that they don’t make me feel better.

She's about to lift her fist to knock against the window, but she pauses because the person sitting next to Jack is stroking her husband's leg with beautiful long white fingers. Jack looks down at his leg and interlaces his fingers with the woman's. She pulls him towards her and he gives in easily. Cassie watches, paralyzed, as they come together in a way that looks inevitable, the pressure too great to not put their lips together, for his hands not to hold her face as he kisses it, her red hair cascading between his fingers like lava. He's kissed Cassie like that so many times. She touches her face, almost expecting to feel his hands there, where they should be, holding her face, not holding [the woman's]. Cassie can't move. It's as though her mind has been cleaved clean away from her body. She watches them push and pull against each other, watches as [the woman] smiles behind her kissing mouth and her fingers fall to Jack's fly, like they've been there before. Cassie's heart dilates and contracts painfully, like the organ itself has been thumped hard. The force shoves her backwards, and she grips the window frame to stop herself falling.

I ordered a third pint, skillfully avoiding eye contact with the barman when Ange arrived. It had been four months since I last saw her. Four months since she'd got the phone call from the police. I'd been gone a week, and had ended up under Waterloo Bridge, apparently trying to find a building site I thought I was managing. I'd been out of work for a year. Without a word she drove me to a cheap hotel in Worthing, a few miles from home. She'd already dumped my clothes inside. In the Green Man, Ange's blonde hair was longer than I remembered. I wanted to tell her she looked pretty but she curled her lip when she saw me, as if I smelt bad, and she didn't look pretty anymore.

The flash of the car lights from behind startles her, like they're intruding on her private moment and have caught her doing something no one else should see. The car is familiar. She waves, casting shadows on the lane, her arms preposterously long. She breaks into a little run; the lane widens ahead, they can stop and talk there. But it's as though running has caught the car's attention-exposed some weakness in her-and she feels as if the car lights have locked onto her back with an animalistic ferocity, like the glazed eyes of a wild animal in a trance of instinct, nostrils full of prey. She feels the lights coming faster and faster, galloping towards her. A scream rips from her throat, but the wind whips her voice away, as if it's needed elsewhere, at another drama. The car growls, so close behind her now.

The darkness seems to pull her towards it, holding her in a freezing embrace as she moves down the lane and deeper into the treacle-thick night. The air electrocutes her lungs with each icy inhale, and her legs feel slick, sure of their new direction. She hears the stream bubbling by her side and the branches from the silver birch trees creak over her head like arthritic fingers knitting together. The moon shines its mottled, kindly face, silvering her path like a fairy godmother; she smiles up at it before it vanishes again behind a fast-moving cloud. She feels entirely of the world; it moves easily along with her, as though some invisible force has, with a small sigh, been released within her, and she's in step with life. She starts to hum, surprising herself, something made-up, childlike; it's nonsense but she doesn't care and she doesn't feel ashamed. Why didn't she notice before how smooth the world can be?

I'd been thinking about how close Jack and his mum seemed, their love for each other active and unashamed. But then, that's what tends to happen, loved ones rally for the initial drama, attracted to the shock, and then slowly people wander away, disinterested in the long grind towards rehabilitation.

... my dad's silence from behind his newspaper becoming another presence in the room...

A tube runs from the back of her blond head where the neurosurgeon drilled into her skull to insert a temporary probe in the cavity to monitor the inter-cranial pressure and swelling around her brain.

I wonder as I always do with new patients who she is, what her laugh sounds like, what she had planned to do today. Maybe she should have been meeting a friend for coffee right now. Even with the bruises, the cuts and her broken fingers, she doesn't look like she belongs here. She looks like she's pretending.