‘I feel I should let you have it, but I’m bloody freezing and you’ve got several decades on me.’
She laughs through the tears she’s still crying, grabs her rucksack and heads off across the fields. She feels sick with fear – for River, for herself, for all of them. She wonders if Meadow will be arrested again and says a silent prayer, even though she’s been an atheist ever since reading Marx. She allows herself to turn back, just the once. She sees Peatbog rolling up the banner, stuffing it back in the bag. She sees Meadow, still hunched over River’s grey form on the ground. She sees a policewoman put one of the drivers into handcuffs. She sees the smooth, shining tankers, one of them with its cab door swinging open like a broken jaw.
She thinks she sees dreadlocks but perhaps she dreams it. She imagines a mole and a frown.
But she can’t think of that now. She has to get back. She wishes she had Fliss to talk to about it, but her aunt is dead and now River probably is too and as she half walks, half runs to the minibus, she senses a rising nausea in her gullet and she has to stop to bend over and throw up in the undergrowth. Vomit spatters back onto her jeans. Everyone is going to die, she thinks grimly, and no one apart from Oblivion Oil seems to care. She kicks the ground. As the sun rises over doomed England, she makes a solemn promise to herself to stay angry. To stay fighting.
It’s what River would want.
V.
Fliss
SHE HAD THOUGHT DEATH WOULD BE INSTANT:a final blankness. She had never had any kind of religious faith. No comforting belief in an afterlife of running through sunny meadows with long-passed pet Labradors. No sense of God waiting for her on the other side, ready to contemplate her numerous sins. She had expected nothing. Just an extinguishing. The spluttering light of her candle snuffed by an unknown hand.
Instead, there is this: a floating. A sense of being still of the world but also, somehow, above it. She has no physical form. Her soul expands across the infinite, connecting with every molecule. Limbo holds her in its strange, timeless pocket and she is overcome by a blissful sense of belonging. There is no separation between her and all the other atoms that coalesce into existence.
It’s like the best trip she’s ever been on, except this time her thoughts are sharp with the fullness of her understanding.
Finally, unshackled from her human self, she can see … everything.
VI.
Martin
BEFORE WE GET TO THE FUNERAL, you might want to know about the last time I saw Fliss. Then again, you might not, but the great thing about this kind of writing is that I’m afraid you don’t get a choice in the matter.
It was about five years ago and I’d been walking through King’s Cross station. I had caught the train from Cambridge to spend an afternoon in the British Library, which held an intriguing book about Van Gogh’s correspondence – more specifically, the discrepancies between later printed volumes of his letters and the artist’s original words. I enjoyed my hours at the BL, surrounded by other academics and writers with their regulation see-through plastic bags and their air of studious displacement, as if they didn’t quite belong to the world. I felt I was among my people, away from the dearth of intellectual motivation that soaked through every brutalist brick of the University of South Anglia.
The train was running late because it always ran late. It is a pet theory of mine that the British like to keep their railway system in a state of terminal inefficiency as it distinguishes us from Nazi Germany. We believe we are a country incapable of dictatorial rule when, in truth, we are just as susceptible to the lure of monstrous men (and it is always men) as everywhere else. It’s simply that we hide it more cleverly.
And because the train was running late, so was I, which is why I found myself striding at considerable speed across the concourse,trying to weave in and out of the gaggle of schoolchildren posing for pictures alongside the Harry Potter platform.
I was in this agitated state of mind when I swiped my phone barcode through the ticket barriers and hurriedly made a right towards the St Pancras Hotel. That’s when I saw Fliss. She was crouched down, sitting on her haunches, talking to a homeless man who was slumped against one of the station’s semi-circular archways. The man was in tatty clothes and walking boots. His face was bearded, the skin mottled. He had a Tesco bag for life next to him, the colour of it bleached white with age. I remember thinking he was quite good-looking, in an outdoorsy, pioneer-on-the-breadline kind of way.
I went to stand behind a coffee stall so that I could watch without being observed. I didn’t want to speak to Fliss. It would have been uncomfortable, given that the last interaction I’d had with any of the Fitzmaurices was in a police station, shortly after the night of Ben’s fortieth birthday party.
I watched as Fliss chatted animatedly to the homeless man. At one point they both laughed, then Fliss took out a pouch of tobacco from the pocket of her trousers and started rolling a cigarette. She looked wired and nervous, her movements jerky. Her hair was long and matted, a dull brown shot through with strands of grey. In spite of myself, I was sad for her. Fliss, who had once been so sure of herself, seemed uncertain, as if the lines of her selfhood had been rubbed out by some unknown hand. Now, only the faint paper imprint remained. I shouldn’t care. I should hate her as much as I despised the other members of her family. But there was some pulling sensation in my stomach, a tug that took me back to the waters of a different past. One where I wasn’t crooked or wrong; a past where I was able to do what was expected of me. We could have saved each other, I thought, with a surfeit of sentimentality that makes me cringe as I now commit it to paper.
She had liked me once, I knew that. She had wanted me to kiss her when we were teenagers. A yellow-green summer afternoon when the midges hung low to the edge of the Denby lake. She had snaked herarm around my neck and tilted her head towards mine, lips moist. But I’d been too busy watching her brother, the ripple of his shoulder blade against tanned skin as he removed his T-shirt; the dapple and slice of the water as he waded in.
Fliss lit up and inhaled before passing the cigarette to her friend. She stood, blowing out smoke and arching her back. She stretched her arms, and then sat down next to the man again, propping herself up against the station wall, her legs splayed out. They continued talking and smoking and then – oh so casually – Fliss turned towards the man’s face and placed her hand on his neck, drawing him to her and the two of them started kissing. It was a full-mouthed kiss that lasted several seconds. I was shocked by it, even though I’d had my own fair share of street-side dalliances. I’d risked being caught in public toilets and darkened alleyways. But I’d always been discreet. Because those interactions weren’t me, you see. They weren’t the full truth of Martin Gilmour. They were something I did to fulfil a need. But me? Well, I existed separately from them. What was it E. M. Forster said? The passion and the prose. The angel and the beast. Sometimes I needed to let desire off its leash.
This, in broad daylight, was different. It bespoke a brashness that worried me. It suggested a certain attitude – the attitude of a person who was giving up. I held my briefcase more tightly. I remember being angry about my own concern. She didn’t deserve it. None of them did. She was nothing to do with me and I was nothing to do with her. And yet, I seemed still to care.
I turned away.
I bought myself a double espresso from the coffee stall. At my feet, a pigeon started pecking at discarded croissant crumbs. I kicked at it. The bird shuddered and squawked. The pavement was filthy with droppings. The dirt repelled me. I walked briskly to the British Library, knocking back the espresso so quickly that it burned my tongue.
And now, five years on, here I am – most unexpectedly – making my way to Felicity Fitzmaurice’s funeral. I still have no idea why I’ve beeninvited and it’s causing me some consternation. ‘Anxiety’ is what Jacob Malik-Edwards would no doubt label it, or ‘a mental health issue’. But it’s not that. It’s nervousness. What will it be like to see Ben again? I’ve followed his career with interest in the papers and on the evening news. But being in his presence will be a strange experience, a bit like seeing a painting one has spent years studying only in reproduction.
Did Fliss mention me? Maybe she insisted in her will that I be there? Maybe, despite her silence, she remained fond of me in the intervening years? Or – and this is my most private wish – perhaps it’s Ben who has softened and wants to make amends? I tell myself I no longer want or need anything from Ben Fitzmaurice, but the truth is that the mere thought of seeing him causes my heart to race as though I’m a character in a schmaltzy novel. It used to race because I loved him. Today, it beats furiously because I despise him. Yet the physical sensation is the same.
In the taxi from the railway station, I recognise each loop and bend in the country road as we approach Denby Hall. Here is the village newsagent where we used to buy magazines and chocolate and lime-green alcopops. There is the rolling hill Ben and I sledged down in winter. Here is the bus shelter, erected in memory of the Great War, where we once took mushrooms. And there – rising suddenly from the valley as the taxi driver takes a sharp right turn – are the large wrought-iron Denby Hall gates. They arch up to a central standing stone lion, flanked by two terracotta urns. It’s a bit much, really. The lion has Venetian pretensions, but the artistry is clumsy and the urns are badly executed. No élan.
‘Family friend, then?’
The driver catches my eye in the rear-view mirror.
