Читать книгу Entanglement - Katy Mahood, Katy Mahood - Страница 10

4 August 2007

From below, the arches of Paddington Station reach towards the night sky. Stella sits, silent in her wedding clothes, sipping tea from a paper cup, waiting for the call to the sleeper train. Beside her, John leans back on his chair, his arm resting on their luggage. On the other side of the station, on a bench near a darkened shop front, Stella notices a man in a hat. He looks up and their gaze meets across the concourse. When he nods, Stella smiles in return.

John looks up at the arches of the roof. He knows that they are moving through time and space, spinning on a planet that is orbiting a star – and yet the late-night station seems quite still. A moment later, a clutch of pigeons bursts upwards; his knee knocks the table; hot tea spills. Stella leaps to her feet, skidding in her high heels as John reaches out to catch her a fraction too late. She lands with a gasp on the floor and looks down at her expensive cream skirt, where a murky stain blooms along the thigh. Her ankle hurts. She swallows hard and looks up. For a fraction of a second she sees his face as it once was: wide-eyed and taut with longing. A fine trail shimmers in the light above them and she turns towards the roof, searching for a tiny piece of the young woman who stepped from a train and the young man who was once there to meet her – but all she can see now is dust.

Scalar time passes. The hands on the large clock move. The man in the hat stands and leaves. On Platform 1, Stella takes John’s hand as they climb aboard the train and her eyes travel once more around the station, seeking out fragments of her past. She sees herself at twenty-one at the beginning of an academic career. Her violin case balanced on top of a suitcase weighted with books, a knot tightening from her stomach to her throat, her mother and father trotting to keep up as she pushes the trolley through the thronging travellers. They had bundled into a taxi, a sudden rainstorm blurring the windows of the cab as they’d watched commuters and tourists rush for cover beneath the dripping black awnings of Praed Street.

When, later that day, she’d arrived in the pub just off Gower Street with a straggling group of postgraduates, she’d noticed an angular man with sandy-coloured hair and hands that moved with quick precision as he talked. Bell-bottomed brown cords and a murky green T-shirt. Scientist, she’d thought, and turned to go. But her bag had clipped a glass and knocked a pint of bitter into his lap and, to her shame, Stella’s eyes had filled with unwanted tears. And then he’d smiled. It was a generous, lopsided smile that made it easy to laugh an apology and offer to buy him a drink. His hand had brushed her arm as they spoke and at his touch she’d felt something pass over her like light. With John the world had felt infused with colour and, as they walked together through the broad white streets of Bloomsbury, she’d had the sense that London was bursting to life beneath her feet.

More than thirty years on, the station feels the same, despite the screens and signs that jostle for attention. It is, she thinks, as it has always been, a threshold place of beginnings and farewells. Stella looks again at John, who raises her hand to his lips. She finds her thoughts are flying back and forth across the years; moments forgotten for decades rising to the surface, casting ripples that gather and collide, so that everything around her seems coated in a mismatched layer of the past. She can almost smell it as it teeters on the edges of her memory, that nameless musk of youth and sex and hope.

Outside the station, night buses rumble. A rowdy group of students stumbles past St Mary’s Hospital. The late-night shops have drawn down their shutters as the man walks past, his hat now in his hand. He sits for a moment on a low wall and wonders, not for the first time, what might have happened that day had he not descended the cellar steps. There’s no use in thinking like that, Charlie, he says aloud, and after a minute he stands up again and continues to walk.

The students are gone now and Charlie moves quietly in the dark streets, down Sussex Gardens and towards the park. Far away over Oxford Street the city-glow lightens the sky, but the dawn is still a good way off. In the inky still of Hyde Park, the dew has begun to fall. It clings to his heavy shoes and to the cuffs of his suit trousers, which grow thick and cold with the damp. He walks on to the middle of the park, where there is only a suggestion of the city beyond. Here, at the centre, there is almost solitude and except for the orange nub of the tall hotel to the east all is dark. Tired suddenly, he lies in the damp grass and the memories begin, as he knew that they would. But this time they start earlier, in the daylight, in a spot not far from here. He sees it as he saw it then: a young girl running in a thin red dress, the flash of her thigh as the fabric billows in the wind, her hand upon the curve of her belly, a tall man running back towards her. A name. Stella. As he closes his eyes, he feels a brief and unexpected peace pass through him and into the earth below.

And then, as they always do, the scenes behind his eyes grow dark. He feels the familiar lurch within and holds tight to his legs to make himself tiny and hard, but the images run through his mind as if on a loop: a smoke-filled silence, the blue-black glitter of lights on shattered glass, a white hand in the dark. In the chill night he hears his ragged breath and the creak of his clothes as he rocks back and forth in the grass. He knows this will pass. He remembers how it goes. And yet, it always feels as if this might be the big one, the point of no return. The thought is like a shriek, an involuntary gasp, rushing out of him unchecked.

Is this how it feels to be dying?

A dark chasm of fear looms before him, blank as a dialling tone, and he screws his eyes shut and hums to draw himself back from its infinite, terrifying space.