August (24 page)

He bit his tongue, whether hard enough to make it bleed he could not tell. All was blood now. All was pain.

‘He knew!' Tristan roared, so loud that it felt as if his own throat might be shredded by it, but she did not recoil. He shook her head and heard the dull thud of bone on metal. She stared back, refusing to be moved by his tantrum. ‘Before I decided, he knew how I would decide! How can that not matter? How can that not be the end of us?'

‘You said it yourself!' she screamed in return, as if hoping her voice might pierce his certainty. ‘You used the word. Decided. You still decided. You made a choice. A choice between two paths.'

‘But one of them wasn't open to me.'

‘I don't know what that means,' she said. ‘And neither do you.'

‘It means it was never going to happen.'

She rolled her eyes and her disdain triggered a moment of uncertainty in him.

‘And what would it be like,' she challenged, ‘this world where alternative paths remained open even after the event had happened? It is incoherent. And now you want to kill me because you hope it will let you believe in a world neither of us can even imagine?'

His felt her words vibrating through his hands. The argument surprised him. Not its vigour—who wouldn't defend their right to breathe—but its subtlety. It unsettled him that a lifetime's learning could be met so easily by an untrained mind.

‘There is a difference.' His voice was shaking and he felt his hands tighten, urging its silence. Tears stung his eyes. He did not want this, he did not want it done. ‘The rector knew my mind before I knew it myself. I felt I was choosing the path, but the path had already chosen me. That is my point.'

‘Then your point is hollow,' Grace said. ‘Where is the loss in behaving in a way that is predictable? The finest people I have ever met have been the most predictable. It speaks of their character, that in the face of life's challenges their values still shine through. You shrink from predictability when you should aspire to it.'

‘There is no point in aspiring to anything,' Tristan replied, ‘if success or failure is determined in advance.'

‘And what is the alternative to this determinism?' she screamed. ‘You said it, Tristan. The alternative is disorder. You can be wilful or you can be free. You told me that. And now you choose chaos over purpose, death over love.'

From the first time he had seen her this had been her way. She could reshape the world before his eyes, making every familiar thing strange.

‘So how are we any different from the balls in the cradle?' Tristan asked. ‘Tell me that.'

His hands shook so violently he wasn't sure he could control them. He saw the grotesque swelling of his knuckles, and couldn't believe they were part of him. But he did not tighten his grip. He waited for her to answer. He wanted her to answer.

‘We are different,' Grace said, ‘because of the stories we tell ourselves, and the stories we tell each other. They contribute as much to our trajectories as the physics of our collisions. You and I are stuck here because of the stories your teachers told you. We are here because of the God you cannot stop believing in.'

‘God is no part of my argument.'

‘He is your whole argument,' she returned, ‘and I am your sacrifice. Don't you see? All the philosophy they taught you, it's just a game. An exercise in being clever, in twisting your thoughts into ever more elaborate patterns. But those games belong behind the walls of the monasteries and universities. To bring them out into the world is a kind of insanity.'

‘That is a shallow argument.'

‘You are right: I argue in favour of shallowness. I make choices, Tristan; so do you. I know this as clearly as I know the feel of rain on my face or the bright glare of sunshine. You have made the will disappear in the way a conjurer makes a rabbit vanish, and it is insanity to believe your own trickery. There is no magic in the world. There is no God. There is you and there is me and this car turned on its roof and above us, I would wager, some slab of rock obscuring us from view, because it is light now and if anyone on the road was to spot us it would have already happened. So kill me if you must, but don't think it makes you any more free. It can never be right, Tristan, that I should die for your vanity.'

He squeezed again, throttling her words, sending her into a spasm of choking. Her eyes bulged, lost and terrified. Again he relented and she coughed blood down at the ceiling. He could not do it. He could not kill the thing he loved. Defeat settled on him. He could not look at her.

‘He was right,' Tristan muttered. ‘I am not free.'

He heard her slump against the side of the car. He could feel her shaking and he thought he heard her crying. He wanted to hold her. He wanted his past back. He wanted her.

Tristan listened to the music of the world, the rise and fall of the wind, the insistent percussion of his heart, and somewhere in the distant world the small uncertain melody of a bird that held no opinion on their predicament. He listened to her breathing, slow again, and wondered at the strangeness of love that even now brought such joy at the sound of her recovering.

‘You are free, Tristan,' she whispered. ‘I can show you.'

‘Don't,' he told her. ‘Let the argument lie now. You have won.'

‘Not yet,' she replied. ‘We are still trapped.'

‘I don't understand.'

‘You say the choices we face are not real, but how about this one? If we stay here, there is a chance no one will see us. Perhaps one day they will come searching for their car, but we will be dead by then. Or I may be wrong. It may be just that no driver has looked down this way, or the sun is not yet high enough in the sky to mark our colour out amongst the rocks. Perhaps salvation is nearer than we dare hope.

‘But we have tumbled this car before and we can do it again. If the drop to the bottom is small it won't hurt us more and it might move us to a place where we can be seen. If the fall is great then we will die trying to save ourselves. And that is a choice, isn't it? Imperfect, as all choices are, but how can you say we are not free when right now our future depends on it?'

He said nothing. He had no answer.

‘So what do we do? Do we wait and hope, or do we try to rock the car from its resting place? This is not fate, Tristan. Nothing is determined and there is no rector here to tell us which way you will jump. There is just you and me, and life and death. You can reduce it to physics if you want to, but I will still ask you what you want to do and you must still tell me. This is life, Tristan, yours and mine, the whole game resting on a simple choice, imperfect and constrained, as all choices are. Whether we live or die depends on this decision and there is nobody else here to make it for us.'

She paused, waiting for Tristan's response. He had nothing.

‘You cannot argue we are not free, Tristan. Freedom is all we have. What do you want to do? Tell me and I will do it.'

Tristan laughed, a sudden release that took him by surprise, and she laughed too. Their monstrous sounds filled the cabin, a cackling bloody echo—two souls moved to a point past caring. Tristan felt the pain of his shaking body, but he couldn't stop it. Delirium took hold and he offered no resistance.

Tristan felt light again. He reached out his hand and she met his fingertips with her own.

‘What will it be?' she whispered.

Tristan considered the choice. He felt a tightening at his temples, the great vice of self-pity.

‘I am frightened,' he said, hoping that naming the thing might diminish it, but his fear leaped at the word, inflating it to impossible proportions. ‘I don't want to die.'

He waited.

‘This is where you tell me we're not going to die,' he said.

‘Do we wait here or do we move the car?' she pressed.

‘It is not for me to decide.'

‘One of us must.'

Tristan's mind froze, his thoughts caught on a Mobius strip of intention and denial. He turned away from the decision hoping that it might resolve itself without him. Nothing. He looked at Grace, seeing for the first time how young she was. Hers was the face of a child waking from a nightmare, seeking out its parent. The decision was his.

The future split in two before him, each path lined with hope and shaded by death. He closed his eyes and waited. Slowly, surely, the decision settled over him. He breathed it in, until he and the decision were one.

‘We do it,' he whispered to her. ‘We move the car.'

‘Are you waiting for me?' Grace asked.

‘Yes.'

‘I'm waiting for you.'

‘It could take a while then.'

‘Yes.'

‘Is there something we should say, do you think?' Tristan asked.

‘A prayer?' she replied.

‘I don't know. Isn't there one last thing you want to tell the world?'

‘It's not a last thing. They'll see us. They'll come.'

‘So we are to die in denial?'

‘It's how we live.'

She took his hand. Her fingers crushed his knuckles.

They began to rock together, so slowly that at first he was not sure it had begun. His body moved with hers. The car shifted its weight. He heard metal stressing beneath him, and felt the softness of her body melting into his. He pushed back.

‘More!'

She crushed into him. He resisted, bracing with his legs. He let go, screaming now as she was, seeking out every last scrap of rage.

Suddenly she was on top of him, then he on her.

They were floating, tumbling together in a machine not made for tumbling, weightless and free. He considered the physics: gravity recast as acceleration. An odd thought to have, but what thought isn't odd when death breathes close and sticky? The world slowed. He looked at her. They were free.