Dancing With the Virgins

20

Each time Diane Fry emerged from Maggie Crew’s apartment, the rest of the world looked garish and unreal. It was like coming out of the cinema after a horror matinee. One minute it was all nightmare figures leaping out of the dark and blood splattering against the camera lens, and suddenly you found yourself standing at the traffic lights outside Mothercare with the sun in your eyes and an ice-cream van playing ‘Greensleeves’.

Today, Matlock looked like a badly designed Disney-World set. There were the mock turrets of Riber Castle on one side of the valley and the Heights of Abraham and Gulliver’s Kingdom on the other, with the River Derwent in the bottom and the old locomotives getting up steam at Matlock Bridge station. But in between, the design had gone wrong, with crowds wandering about searching in vain for Mickey Mouse and Pluto, and endless traffic choking the central square, where there ought to have been fountains and open-air restaurants, and children demanding Big Macs. And this was one of the quietest times of the year. During the summer, the chaos was mindless. Where were they all going? What were they looking for? What were they trying to escape?

Fry had yet to understand what made twenty-five million people a year visit the Peak District. There were no shopping centres, no big sports arenas, no exhibition centres or concert halls, not even a decent football ground. All these people did was cause problems and pollution, going nowhere and doing nothing. So pointless.

Today, though, Fry was glad of the crowds. Their aimless swarming was an antidote to the obsessive isolation of the apartment at Derwent Court. Maggie’s solitary martyrdom was too reminiscent of periods of her own life — so painful and bitter, yet somehow horribly alluring, like the temptation to give yourself up to drowning when you were too exhausted to swim any more.

Fry knew how easy it was to reach that stage. She knew you could find yourself in a situation where a greeting from a stranger was a torture, and the words ‘good morning’ from the postman were as welcome as the plague. When somebody rang the door bell, you not only refused to answer it, you wanted to hide in another room, in case they saw you through the window and knew you were there.

Once you allowed yourself to become a recluse, then the world began to seem a long way off, beyond your reach. It became a place where you would be an alien, if you ever found yourself there. And you knew the people from that world would see you as an alien, too. You were not like them. You were different. Disfigured.

Fry supported herself against the side of her car and shuddered. Memory was such a physical thing. It was more physical than her own skin, than the clothes she wore, or the ground she stood on. A terrible, physical thing. And some memories never seemed to lose their power to hurt. They never weakened with age, nor dimmed as the years went by. They simply slipped behind a cloud of everyday concerns and trivial preoccupations, waiting until the right moment to emerge, more powerful than ever. And memories still hit hardest when they were most unexpected.

There was no doubt Maggie Crew was a damaged woman. Fry had begun to dread going to see her. While she was there, in Maggie’s house, she felt somehow at home. Yet afterwards, within a few minutes of leaving, when she was sitting in the car with her hand on the ignition key, she would suddenly begin to shake. She realized now that she was sweating, her hands were trembling, and her legs felt weak, as if she hadn’t eaten for days. She had to wind down the window and let in the cold air to shock herself back into alertness.

She wasn’t used to feeling so drained of energy as she was now. She was usually able to direct energy into her body at a moment’s notice. She had trained for years to feel it flow and channel it where it was needed. But an hour with Maggie Crew had sapped that vitality. So what was going wrong?

There were things for her to do back at HQ, but nothing urgent — she had been given a free hand to spend as long as she needed to with Maggie. That meant she had time to call at her own flat in Edendale on the way. She decided a shower would help wash away the cold stickiness that was clinging to her skin.

Yet Fry drove round town for a while, turning through the steep streets aimlessly, unwilling to arrive home until her energy had returned and her mood had dissipated.

Of course, there was a physical reason for her frame of mind, too. Her body craved action, something to focus the pent-up tension, some target to hit out at. Her old shotokan master in Warley had taught her to recognize the feeling and use it. Very soon, she would have to find time to visit her new dojo in Sheffield to get that release, or the dark well of anger would boil over and the wrong target would be in the way.

For Fry, each time she found herself back with Maggie Crew in that soulless apartment now it was like leaving the light to enter a tunnel. She recalled the tunnel on the High Peak Trail, with its dripping water and landslides of rock barely held back by the wooden roof. But she had been with Ben Cooper then, and that made a difference.

Gradually, she felt her normal equilibrium coming back, and she turned the wheel towards Edendale. Her flat in Grosvenor Avenue was depressing enough, but in a tangible sort of way. It was simply dismal and uncomfortable, not laden with painful emotions. That was what she had liked about the place when she had rented it — it held no memories, no associations, not even any significant possessions from her old life. She had thrown them all away, given them to charity shops or dumped them in recycling bins — books, clothes, the lot. So the flat was empty of feeling. A cold kind of comfort.

Fry waited outside the flat until she was sure that the mood had gone. But even then, when she got inside and stared with glad contempt at the filthy walls, there was a niggle at the back of her mind, a lingering suspicion that she had brought something of Maggie Crew with her into the room. She cursed. She had learned to recognize emotional entanglement the moment it began to infect her. The first twinge of it indicated a lowering of her defences, a weakness in her immune system that had to be tackled. A course of antibiotics was what she needed, a period of isolation, perhaps.

She looked at her diary. She had made an appointment with Maggie Crew for Friday. She would phone to cancel it in the morning. She took out her pen and put a thick, black line through the date. She immediately felt better.

Stride had started measuring the days. When each one arrived, it was shorter than the last. And the moor was changing as he watched; it was dying slowly on itself, folding and shrivelling, transforming like a chameleon to adapt itself to the new season. As the days shortened, the green chlorophyll broke down in the leaves. Its gradual ebbing away revealed the underlying colours — the yellows, oranges and reds that had been masked all summer. Toxic waste products excreted into the dying leaves made the trees shrink away from their own foliage. They were rejecting parts of themselves as superfluous, recoiling as if from something alien and repulsive, so that their stems dried and loosened on the branch and the wind carried the unwanted leaves away.

But Stride knew this wasn’t really death he was seeing. It wasn’t an ending, only the preparation for another beginning. The leaves that drifted to the ground in their millions would slowly decay and disintegrate, returning nutrients to the soil and into the tree roots, ready for growth to begin again next spring. The great recycling system had started up. Millions of organic systems would break down and be renewed on a scale far beyond anything that Derbyshire Dales District Council could dream of.

In some places, though, he had found the foliage of the mountain ash and of more exotic, imported species, like the Russian vines that climbed the walls of roadside cottages. These leaves were red. And they made Stride think of death — of real death. He tried to avoid them, drawing back the toes of his Doc Martens as if touching the dead leaves would contaminate him. He hated the way they spread in soft, wet layers on the ground. He hated their colour and their slithery consistency. They looked to him like ever-widening pools of congealing blood.