The First Cut

46 Kirsten

Kirsten stared out of the window at the landscape beyond her reflection. The rounded green hills of the Cotswolds soon gave way to the fertile Vale of Evesham, where barley and wheat looked ready for harvest in the fields, and apples, pears and plums hung heavy on their trees in the hillside orchards.

Then came the built-up landscape of the Midlands: cooling towers, the sprawling monotony of council estates, allotments, greenhouses, a redbrick school, a football field with white goalposts. When the train crept into Birmingham and she could feel the huge city pressing in on all sides, she began to feel nervous. This was, after all, her longest journey in ages, and she was making it alone. For over a year she had been living in a soft, comfortable, familiar world, shuttling between the Georgian elegance of Bath and the bucolic indifference of Brierley Coombe.

Now it was gray and raining and she was in Birmingham, a big, rough city with slums, skinheads, race riots and all the rest. Luckily, she didn’t have to get off the train there. She hoped Sarah would be at the station to meet her when she arrived at her destination.

After a twenty-minute stop, the train pulled out and lumbered past twisting concrete overpasses into another built-up area: the derelict warehouses with rusty zigzag fire escapes, and the messy factory yards stacked high with crates and pallets that always seemed to back onto train tracks in cities. It ran alongside a busy commuter road, a dirty brown canal, and a dark brick embankment wall scrawled with graffiti. Next came a few green fields with grazing cows, and then the train settled into a steady, lulling clickety-click through Derbyshire into South Yorkshire, with its slag heaps and idle pit wheels, a landscape in which all the green seemed to have been smudged by an inky finger that was now running in the rain.

Kirsten closed her eyes and let the rhythm carry her. She would stay with Sarah a day or two perhaps, until she felt it was time to go. Despite what she had told her parents, she had not suggested that Sarah take time off work. Kirsten would say she was going to the Dales walking for a few days alone. If that sounded odd-after all, she had spent the last year in the countryside, much of the time alone-then it was too bad. But Sarah would take her word. It was surprising how eager people were to believe her about anything after what had happened to her.

The rain had stopped when Sarah met her at the station later that evening. They allowed themselves the luxury of a taxi to take them back to the bedsit. All the way, Sarah chatted about how glad she was that Kirsten had decided to come back, and how they would look for a flat together as soon as Kirsten had got her bearings again. Kirsten listened and made the right responses, glancing left and right out of the window like a nervous bird as familiar sights unfolded around her: the tall, white university tower, the terraces of sooty redbrick student housing, the park. Washed and glistening after the rain, it all took her breath away with its combination of familiarity and strangeness. For fifteen months it had been simply a landscape of the mind, a closed-off world in which certain things had happened and been filed away. Now that she was actually riding through it again in a taxi, she felt as if she had somehow drawn her surroundings from deep inside herself, from her imagination. She was no longer in the real world at all; she was in a painting, an imagined landscape.

It was getting dark outside when they arrived at the flat. Kirsten followed Sarah up the stairs, remembering with her body rather than in her mind how often she had made this journey before. Her feet remembered in their cells the cracked linoleum they trod, and her fingertip seemed to hold within it the memory of the light switch she pressed.

When she entered her room itself, she had that sensation, however mistaken, of being at a journey’s end. It was something she had felt so often before, arriving home after lectures or tiring exams. She remembered the occasional day spent ill in bed with a cold or a sore throat, when she would read and watch the shadows of the houses opposite slowly crawl up the far wall and over the ceiling until the room grew so dark that she had to put the reading lamp on.

She dropped her holdall in the corner and looked around. Some of her belongings were still in their original places: a few books and cassettes in the main room and mugs and jars in the little kitchen alcove. All Sarah had done was clear space for her own things. There was no problem with clothes, of course, as Kirsten had emptied the cupboard of most of hers, but Sarah had filled one cardboard box with some of Kirsten’s books and papers to make room for her own on the shelves and the desk.

“Well?” Sarah said, watching her. “Not changed much, has it?”

“No, it hasn’t. I’m surprised.”

“Does it upset you, being back here again?”

“No,” said Kirsten. “I don’t think so. I’m not sure. It’s just a very odd feeling, hard to explain.”

“Well, don’t worry about it. Just sit down for now. Do you want some tea? Or there’s wine. I got a bottle of plonk. Thought you might like that better than going out on the first night.”

“Yes, that’s great. I don’t much fancy going out. I’m a bit tired and shaky. But some wine would be nice.”

Sarah took the bottle from the small refrigerator and held it up. It was a pale gold color. “Aussie stuff,” she said. “A Chardonnay. Supposed to be good.” She picked up two glasses from the dish rack and searched for the corkscrew in the kitchen drawer. Finally, everything in hand, she filled their glasses and brought them through. “Cheese? I’ve got a wedge of Brie and some Wensleydale.”

“Yes, please.”

Sarah brought in the cheese with a selection of biscuits on a Tetley’s tray, liberated from the Ring O’Bells. They toasted the future and drank. Kirsten helped herself to some food, then picked up a book she noticed lying on the floor by the armchair. It was a thick biography of Thomas Hardy. “Is this what you’re reading right now?” she asked.

Sarah nodded. “I’m thinking about doing my Ph.D. in Victorian fiction, and you know how I love biographies. It seemed a pleasurable enough way of getting back into academic gear.”

“And is it? I mean, Hardy’s hardly a light, cheerful read, is he?”

Sarah laughed. “I don’t know about a pessimist, but he was certainly a bloody pervert.”

“How?” asked Kirsten. “I’ve only read Far from the Madding Crowd for that novel course in first year. I don’t even remember much about that except some soldier showing off his fancy swordplay. I suppose that was meant to be phallic?”

Sarah laughed. “Yes, but that’s not what I meant. All writers do that kind of symbolism thing to some extent, don’t they?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, for one thing,” Sarah went on, “do you know he used to like attending public executions when he was in his teens? Especially when women were being hanged.” She reached for the book and turned the pages slowly as she talked. “There was one in Dorchester and he told someone about it when he was much older…ah, here it is…1856. Martha Browne was the woman’s name, and she was hanged for murdering her husband. She caught him with another woman and they got into a fight. He attacked her with a whip and she stabbed him. Hanging her was the Victorians’ idea of justice. Anyway, Hardy went along and wrote about it.” She pushed the book under Kirsten’s nose. “Just look at that.”

Kirsten read: “What a fine figure she showed against the sky as she hung in the misty rain, and how the tight black silk gown set off her shape as she wheeled half round and back.”

“I mean, really,” Sarah went on, “the poor woman was swinging at the end of a bloody rope and Hardy makes out as if she was entering some kind of wet T-shirt contest. Would you credit it?”

Kirsten read over the description; it was certainly tinged with eroticism.

“Am I right?” Sarah asked, pouring more wine. “Don’t you get the feeling that Hardy got some kind of kinky sexual pleasure from watching the woman get snuffed?” She put a hand to her mouth quickly. “Oh. I’m sorry, love. I…I put my foot in it. Must be the wine going to my head. I mean, I wasn’t thinking. I didn’t mean to…you know.”

Kirsten waved her hand. “It’s all right. I’d rather you say what you like than walk around handling me with kid gloves. I can take it. And anyway, you’re right, it is sexual.”

“Yes. And what’s more, did you notice how he turns her into some sort of convenient image for a poem. As if her life was only important because he got a charge from watching her get hanged. She wasn’t even a person, an individual, to him.”

“I wonder what she was like,” Kirsten said abstractedly.

“We’ll never know, will we?”

“I suppose not. But it’s not as odd as all that, is it? The way Hardy uses her, I mean. We all tend to see other people as bit players in our own dramas, don’t we? I mean we’re all self-centered.”

“I don’t think so. Not to that extent.”

“Maybe not. But you might be surprised.” She held her glass out and Sarah emptied the bottle. Kirsten was beginning to feel a little tipsy. After the journey and the disorienting effect of coming back to her old room, the wine was affecting her more than it usually would. Still, it wasn’t an unpleasant sensation. She helped herself to another chunk of Wensleydale.

Sarah shook the wine bottle, grinned and jumped up, ruffling Kirsten’s short hair as she passed by. “Fear not,” she said. “I suspected we might need more than the usual amount of alcoholic sustenance. How about some music? All right?”

Kirsten shrugged. “Fine.”

Sarah turned on the cassette player and disappeared behind the curtain into the kitchen. She must have been playing the tape earlier because one song was just fading out, and then “Simple Twist of Fate” began to play. It was the second track on Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks, Kirsten remembered, and it used to be one of her favorites; now, as she listened to Dylan’s hoarse, plaintive voice while Sarah was busy opening the second bottle, she realized that the strange lyrics didn’t mean what she used to think they did. Nothing did anymore.

Sarah returned with a larger bottle, lifting it up with a flourish. “Da-da! More your cheaper kind of plonk, really, but I’m sure at this stage it’ll do.”

Kirsten smiled. “Oh, it’ll do fine.”

“What did you mean,” Sarah asked when she had filled the glasses and sat down, “when you said I’d be surprised? What would I be surprised by?”

Kirsten frowned. “I was thinking of the man who attacked me,” she said. “I wasn’t a person, an individual, to him, was I? I was just a convenient symbol of what he hated or feared.”

“Would it have made any difference?”

“I don’t know. Would it have made any difference if it had been someone I knew? I can think of one way it would have: I’d know who it was.”

“And?”

“I’d bloody well kill him.” Kirsten lifted her glass of wine too quickly and spilled some down the front of her shirt. She patted herself on the chest. “Doesn’t matter,” she said. “It’ll dry.”

“An eye for an eye?”

“Something like that.”

Sarah shook her head slowly.

“I’m not crazy, you know,” Kirsten went on. “I mean it. Oh, there’ve been times…Sometimes I think it’s some sort of contagious disease he gave me, like AIDS, only in the mind. Or like vampirism. Can you imagine all those ripped-up women coming back from the grave to prey on men? Of course, I didn’t die, but maybe a part of me did. Maybe I have a little bit of the undead in me.”

“That’s cuckoo talk, Kirstie. Or drunk talk. You’re not going to convince me you’re turning into some sort of vampire version of Joan of Arc.”

Kirsten looked hard at her and felt the focus blurring. My god, she thought, I’m losing it. I almost told her. She laughed and reached for a cigarette. “You’re right,” she said. “I’m not. It’s all academic anyway, isn’t it?”

“Thank god for that,” Sarah said. The music stopped and she got up and turned over the tape.

As the two of them chatted, Kirsten glanced out now and then at the windows of the bedsits and flats over the street, just as she had in years past. At some point, she noticed “Shelter from the Storm,” another of her favorites, was playing, and her eyes burned with tears. She held them back.

Around midnight, Kirsten began to yawn in the middle of one of Sarah’s stories about a retired brigadier-general who had strayed into Harridan by mistake.

“Boring you, am I?” Sarah asked.

“No. I’m just tired, that’s all. It must be the wine and the travel. How about sleeping arrangements?”

Sarah yawned too. “Look, now you’ve got me at it. How about I take the chair and you have the bed?”

“Oh no, I couldn’t do that.”

“It is your room, after all. I’ve just been caretaking.”

“It was my room. No, I’ll put a couple of cushions on the floor and sleep there.”

“But that’s stupid. You’ll be so uncomfortable. Hell, it’s a three-quarter bed, let’s share it.”

Kirsten said nothing for a moment. The suggestion made her feel nervous and shy. She knew that Sarah wasn’t offering any kind of sexual invitation, but the thought of her own patched-up body next to Sarah’s smooth, whole skin made her cheeks burn.

“I haven’t brought a nightie,” she said.

“Not to worry. I’ve got a spare pair of pajamas. Okay?”

“All right.” Kirsten was too tired to argue, and the idea of sleeping in what had once been her own bed was inviting. When she stood up, she felt herself sway a little. She really had drunk too much.

They prepared themselves for bed and drew the curtains. Kirsten watched Sarah pull her T-shirt over her head and struggle with her tight jeans, then stand there naked and unselfconsciously brush her blond hair in front of the mirror. Her breasts bounced lightly with the motion of her arm, and below her flat stomach, the spun-gold hair between her legs caught the light.

Kirsten undressed last, in the dark, so that Sarah couldn’t see her scars, and when she slipped between the crisp sheets, she found herself staying as close to the edge of the bed as possible to avoid any unconscious contact.

But she needn’t have worried. Sarah lay with her face turned to the wall below the window, and soon her breathing settled into a slow, regular pattern. Kirsten listened for a while, feeling slightly dizzy and nauseated and cursing herself for almost telling Sarah everything she knew, not to mention what she intended to do about it. Eventually, she drifted off to sleep and dreamed of Martha Browne, that unknown woman in black swinging back and forth at the end of a rope in the misty Dorchester rain over a hundred years ago.

The next day, Sarah went into the bookshop, and Kirsten spent the morning revisiting her old campus haunts: the coffee lounge where she had met friends between lectures, the library where she had worked so hard for the final exams. She even wandered into an empty lecture theater and imagined Professor Simpkins droning on about Milton ’s Areopagitica.

Though she had avoided it on her way over, taking the roads instead, Kirsten walked back through the park. As her feet followed the familiar tarmac path through the trees she felt nothing at all, but when she reached the lion, its head still spray-painted blue and the red graffiti still scrawled all over its body, her hands started shaking. Unable to stop herself, she walked over to the sculpture.

It was a little after twelve. Children played on the swings and seesaw nearby. The clack of bowls came from the green behind the low hedge, and one or two people sprawled out on the grass, listening to portable cassettes or reading. But Kirsten still felt extreme unease, as if she had somehow stumbled on a taboo place, an evil spot shunned by natives. She couldn’t help herself when she sat astride the lion, drawing amused glances from two students playing cards on the grass nearby. It all happened so quickly. The fishy smell began to suffocate her and the world darkened at the corners of her vision. Then she saw him and heard his raspy voice and saw the blade flash in the moonlight. She leaped off and hurried on her way, trembling.

As she walked on down the avenue of trees, she cursed herself for giving in to fear. She would need all the courage and strength she could get for what she had to do, and jumping at shadows was a poor start. Still, she told herself, somehow shadows were more frightening to her now than substance. That must be a good sign. It was time to go.

First she went back to the flat and left a note for Sarah, then she went into town. After shopping for one or two essentials she needed for her trip, she headed for the bus station. About three hours later, Martha Browne arrived in Whitby on a clear afternoon in early September, convinced of her destiny.