Читать книгу Twice The Speed of Dark - Lulu Allison - Страница 15

One time ago, I saw him. I couldn’t understand what I was seeing. I hadn’t grasped all my story, his fatal role, though I knew fear and fury; I knew all the things that face meant to me. But I didn’t know what I saw, and as I pulled it behind me, my trailing tail of shredded story, I didn’t know when I had seen it. I had a new memory: me, suddenly painfully full of my old self, tucked alone in the corner of a room of men, including the one who killed me. The feelings pulsed through me, iterations of new and remembered fear fanning outwards to the far reaches, to be kept forever in the waxy record of waveforms etched through the blackness. For me, the room pulsed with it, as if I had after all found myself on a sand dune and the sun’s heat was making sight shimmer. I felt myself move with it; now such dances work through me always. But the men in the room, though they moved before me, were steady within themselves. Movement started inside them, did not land from afar or from the memory of harm. The old man with a hand that shook and a head that nodded as he sat before his tray, even he was subject to movement that originated, though from the betrayal of disease, from within himself.

I rode the seasick waves, the soul-sick fear, until I could accommodate them. I watched Ryan. He looked the same, though he was more contained. Moderated. It was as if he had tidied himself away and was trying to hold the cupboard door shut from the inside. He was wary, watchful. He was tidying away inside too – fear lurked squashed and hidden, forced into a small dark space as though not to see it would lessen its horrible power. Though adeptly he had created fear in me, he had learned nothing of its effect until now. Fear had flown out from his fists, released too quickly to be understood. But there he was, sitting at a table of six other men, learning the opposite of what his instincts thus far had prompted – learning not to be seen. Learning the love of the commonplace, unremarkable ordinariness. When we met, I thought he shone, but here he was, his gold transmuted in reverse, to beige, then the subtle grey of humble woodland creatures not troubled by the desire to shine.

This memory, of course, came from the time after my death, the time of his imprisonment. It took me a while to understand it. So many little fragments. But I am starting to join them up.

I have been back since. Another of those times when I sensed that my anger had pulled me in an arc back towards the Earth. I knew with a tremendous thrill that my thoughts had worked on my trajectory; I was, unaccountably at my own behest, heading toward s an encounter with my past. In a delicious rush of anger I swooped towards him again.

The rush stopped abruptly. I pooled once more in a frustrating manner, as if drugged, conscious of what was around but unable to direct my gaze or order thoughts. He was there on a narrow bed. I could hear his thoughts, his memories – mutterings, anyway. How he muttered his dissatisfactions, his fears and worries, how he tried to tidy it all away, to stop thinking of how afraid he was of this or that man. Bigger, bolder men than him. Men whose violence worked its way out on other men. Men who understood violence without the certainty of weakness in another. How I tried to swim through the seas of his fear, to stir up the waves, make a storm of fear to savour as I watched him cower. But I do not know if I stirred even the cobwebs in his cell.