Читать книгу The Furies - Katie Lowe - Страница 7

The strange thing, they said, wringing their hands and whispering as though we couldn’t hear, or weren’t listening through extension phones or cracks in the walls, was that there was no known cause of death.

Inconclusive, they said, as though that changed the fact of it, which was this: a sixteen-year-old girl, dead on school property, without a single clue to suggest why or how. No unexplained prints on the body, the forensic examination finding no trace of violence, nor rape, nor a single fibre that could not be linked to the girl, her friends, or her mother, whom she had hugged for the last time that morning as she left for school. It was as though her heart had simply stopped, her blood stilled in her veins, preserving her forever in a single moment, watchful as the dawn.

The papers blurred it out, took suggestive photographs of the screen the police erected around the scene, an implicit acknowledgement of the horrors that lay within. But by that time, I’d already seen it. I see it now, sometimes, when I’m struggling to sleep. It’s etched there, in my mind, not because it was horrific, nor due to some long-standing, unresolved trauma. No, my feeling is quite the opposite: a thrill, cold and sweet, in the recall.

I think of the scene, now, because it was so perfectly composed, like a Renaissance painting, the girl’s neck angled slightly, like La Pietà, though I did not see that, then. It was over a decade later, on a tour of the Vatican, that I first realized the likeness. My students, for obvious reasons, thought that my solitary teardrop as I explained the history of the sculpture belied some exquisite taste on my part, a visceral response to the beauty of Michelangelo’s work; I did nothing to disabuse them of that notion.

She was beautiful when she was alive – a child just discovering her power, knowing herself, all collarbones and blooming flesh – but death, it must be said, gave her something of the sublime. A little like the poem, ‘La Gioconda’ by Michael Field: ‘Historic, side-long, implicating eyes; / A smile of velvet’s lustre on the cheek; / Calm lips the smile leads upward; hand that lies / Glowing and soft, the patience in its rest / Of cruelty that waits and doth not seek / For prey …’ An underrated duo to my mind. How I love those words, even now.

In this pose they found her, eyes open, sitting upright on a swing. Immaculately put together, alive but for the blue threads of deoxygenated blood in place of youth’s blush; the impossibly delicate silver threads that tied her hands to the chains, the stiffness of her back, the result of rigor mortis, by the time she was found on the still gently rocking swing. Feet crossed at the ankles, ladylike, though one of her shoes had fallen to the ground below. All this, in a thin, white dress, turned almost see-through by the morning dew. A modern masterpiece, precise and profound.

‘So tragic,’ they said. ‘Another angel taken home,’ written on cards taped to store-bought bouquets, ink dripping in the rain. In the markets, beet farmers and fishermen muttered under their breaths; the local newspapers – whose usual focus was limited to the town’s growing seagull population and the many, endless failures of the one-way system – were filled with photos of her for weeks, her school photo tacked on their banner, ‘Never Forget’, in an incongruously jaunty font beneath. The news reporters – the real reporters, national, international, such was the allure of the image – lurked among the townspeople for weeks, listening for hushed conversations, searching for clues. Hotels saw a dramatic uplift in room occupancy; restaurateurs joked grimly that death should visit more often. That it had been, by all accounts, a very good year.

‘Every possible measure will be taken to get to the bottom of this case, and to prevent anything like this happening in our community again,’ the police chief said, chest puffed, parading peacock-like for the camera. I watched it with my mother, first, and then years later, at home, alone, after an unknown voyeur uploaded it online, grainy in a way that echoed the great tragedies of the TV era. Something about it reminded me of a video I’d found of the Kennedy shooting, the solemn delivery, the echo of the head thrown back. ‘We will investigate every angle, every lead, and every person in contact with this young lady to ascertain the exact circumstances leading up to her tragic death,’ he said.

They didn’t, of course. They ruled out the usual suspects – boyfriends, ex-boyfriends, a deranged parent – all to no avail. Even now, if you search for her name, you’ll find amateur sleuths on message boards posting their own theories – sometimes unhinged, sometimes surprisingly accurate. In the small hours of the night curiosity leads me there, when the darkness falls heavy and my need to see her swells. I’m grateful to the voyeurs of the internet, to the stranger who uploaded the crime scene photos, decades after the fact. They turn my nerves electric, the memory radiating white hot, clear.

For, despite all that followed – the investigation, the questions, the on-camera tears and plaintive words wailed at drooling reporters – even after all these years, I struggle with this one, unspeakable truth: I don’t feel bad about what we did. Any of it. Somehow, I can’t. It’s a crime, of course, and the fear of retribution naturally haunts me. But still, guilt is not the feeling I associate with her death.

Because, in the year I knew her, and in all the events leading up to her death – her murder – I felt more alive than I ever have, before or since. ‘To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame—’ a quote I repeat to my students regularly, though it never seems to capture their imaginations as it did ours – that, Pater said, is success in life. And in the memory of her, I feel that flame burn, hard and bright.

We were close to the divine. We touched gods, felt them flow through our veins. Felt lust, envy, greed, quicken our hearts – but for a while, we were truly, spectacularly alive. It might have been any of us, sitting there like the Madonna on the gently rocking swing. Sheer luck made it her, not me.