The van driver wasn’t waiting though. I watched him in the mirror, a big man manoeuvring his belly from behind the steering wheel and out on to the road. He must have been mad or desperate – anyone could see those jokers were itching to use their guns.
Remember what cities used to sound like – sirens and diggers, music blaring from car windows, jet engines. All gone. There was nothing to cushion us from the sudden burst of gunfire and screaming.
It woke Simon. One minute he’s curled up like a cat, next he’s all attention, peering out through the window. He’d seen enough death, God knows, but here was a new twist – the woman on her knees, the loose end of her sari held to the van driver’s neck before he’d even stopped twitching. It took me a moment to register that she wasn’t trying to save his life – it was too late for that. For her too, it was too late. She was dying of what she’d been dying of already. Remarkable the steadiness of her hand, though, as she printed crimson petals on the wall of the pub. Her legs could hardly hold her. I stopped to watch her stoop and rise five or six times, the delicate touches of silk transforming arterial blood into images of poppies and begonias and drooping pomegranates, and a hint of a red pot as she finally sank towards the pavement. The gunmen were dumbstruck, motionless behind their gas masks. It catches you like that, the blessing, every time.
So I watched. But you can’t predict when the urge to live will kick in. Before I’d had time to think, I’d swung the car into a U-turn, skidded up an empty side street, gunfire jabbering behind us, and I was finding a new route to the motorway.
We’d passed the exit for Slough before I realised I was soaked in sweat. The road was abandoned, we had most of a tank of petrol, the Mercedes would take us wherever we wanted. But my heart was racing, panic rising in my chest. A normal reaction, maybe – to the guns, to the murdered driver. But you know when it’s hit you. Once you’ve got the sweats, the rest follows – the staggers, the blessing, the burn, the pit.
Some people think you get it from looking. You watch someone with the blessing, you can’t not watch, and the disease enters through the eyes. That’s the cunning of it. Cunning bollocks. It’s a contagion like any other – it’s carried on the air and you breathe it in.
So what is it, then, this strange opening to impulses and talents never guessed at – a consolation? Or a twist of the knife, a glimpse of what we might have been even at the point of death, to make us all mad with grief?
I saw him last night, Caro – Simon, on his way to bed. It wasn’t a dream. I think it was last night. I know it was evening because of the way the bathroom window across the landing catches the light from the hills. Abigail held him by the hand, keeping him at a safe distance, though he didn’t seem inclined to come any closer. It was nice of her to bring him to see what’s left of me – his Uncle Jason. Simon’s gaze was curious and sad. I tried to wave, but he was gone before I’d worked out how to get my arm from under the bedclothes. I tried to smile, but my face doesn’t always do what I want it to.
He put me in mind of Penny at that age. Whatever Simon got from his father and whatever the world has done to him since, it was my little sister Penny who gave him that look, like the world’s a puzzle and why won’t you tell him the answer. And my mind was invaded by thoughts of Penny until I was in a turmoil of anguish and rage. And I made myself think about you instead, which quelled the rage, though not the anguish.
Death’s become so ordinary I imagine I’m numb to it. Then it catches up with me and I can hardly breathe for the pain. Caro, Caroline, you were really something. Every day we were together I knew I was in luck. And then the luck ran out – mine, yours, everybody’s. I tell myself your death is nothing. Penny’s death, the biggest thing in Simon’s world – nothing. To weep over you, to tear our hair and rend our clothes in grief – an idolatrous obscenity.
But we do it anyway.
When I sang in the hallway, when I cried to you to come back, it was my soul crying to yours. It was reading to you must have put the idea in my head. Reading’s never been my thing, but when you got sick there wasn’t much else I could do. For some of the book you were delirious, but I reckoned you’d read it so often that it didn’t matter, though it was new to me. So I got to know about Jane Eyre, the orphan who grows up to be a governess, and Rochester who’s ready to marry her even though he’s secretly married already, and Rivers the preacher who takes her in when she runs away and nearly starves on the moor. And you were awake enough to correct me when I pronounced Rivers’ first name as if he was a saint. ‘Not Saint John,’ you said, Sinj’n.’ I thought you were raving – something about sin or sinning. But you said it again. ‘Sinj’n, Sinj’n Rivers.’ And then I got it. And I knew I wasn’t wasting my time. So I kept on to the end. I read myself hoarse, while the sun came and went. I read until the lines of text buckled in front of my eyes. Then your temperature dropped and strange things began to happen to you and we had a row – the last thing we did, the last words we spoke before the blessing hit. We both knew you were dying and we were yelling at each other about a made-up story. You could hardly stand, but you were swinging punches at me and kicking my shins with your bare feet and screaming in my face and I was screaming back. It was ugly.
And it was my fault. Entirely and utterly. What was it made me so angry? I felt robbed. It wasn’t a ghost story – I’d worked that out. Yes, all right, weird things go on in the house – ghostly appearances, eerie laughter in the night, Rochester’s bed’s set on fire – but there’s an explanation for all of it – not the drunk servant Grace Pool as Jane thinks at first, but Rochester’s mad wife Bertha locked away upstairs in Grace’s care. Not a ghost story, then, and not a fairy tale full of magical events. Not until right at the end, when Jane’s miles away across the moor with Sinj’n Rivers, and Rochester calls to her and she hears him. The way I saw it, your Charlotte Bronte had pulled a trick. She’d come up with this pathetic piece of magic to sort everything out. I was furious because I was exhausted and I was furious because there was no magic trick to bring you back.
It was three in the morning, a dead hour in a fucked up world, and I had murder in my heart.
I’ve seen couples fight over some stupid things – what kind of shower fittings they want, the colour of the bedroom carpet – but, honestly Caroline, this was the stupidest. Wasn’t it?
Neither of us could bear that you were dying.
Now it’s my turn to die, in this room that we fixed up to be our haven from the world, when there was still a world to return to whenever we liked. It’s pretty much the way it was when you were last here. The door could open and you’d step in from your bathroom across the landing and you’d slip into bed beside me. That photo of you is still there in its silver frame, the one with the silver lilies up the side – you on the front at Brighton windblown and grinning. Your books are still on the shelves either side of the chimney breast – paperbacks mainly, holiday reading – and an old laptop of yours on the desk in the corner.
We used to hear the road from up here, faintly, when there was traffic – delivery vans shifting gears towards the rise, labouring engines, whatever noise got through the filter of trees and across the lawn. Enough to tell us the world was still out there. But never so much that a rising wind wouldn’t drown it, or a herd of cows passing on the moorland road.