Her Living Image (2 page)

“She is, isn’t she?” Jean said. “She’s nearly too good to be true, your Carolyn.”

Stupidly, Meg had fallen into the trap of defending Carolyn. “Well she is, though I say so myself.
I
’ve never had to lie awake at nights wondering where she is or what
she’s up to, she’s always in bed by ten-thirty, and I’ve never had the cheek from her that some people have to put up with. She’s not one for having lots of noisy friends in
to mess up the place, either – she can amuse herself, thank you. When I look at other people’s kids I thank my stars, I do really.” She wished she’d bitten off her tongue
first. Spiteful bitch, saying things like that. Oh yes, Meg knew it was only jealousy, because Jean’s Lizzie was such a little tramp, and she’d told herself again and again not to blow
her own trumpet about Carolyn. But it’s only natural, isn’t it, to take a pride. Jean shouldn’t have said that.

What Meg feared was that Carolyn really was too good to be true. It seemed to her to be quite likely. She had lost her first baby at birth; complications in a long slow labour, followed by the
use of forceps, had injured it – killed it, she believed, although they told her its heart had already stopped. The second, Darren Philip, was born by Caesarean section. He died for no reason
at two months. A cot death, the doctor said. And Carolyn June was the third. A beautiful baby, a good girl, watched like a hawk by her mother. For the eighteen years of Carolyn’s life, Meg
had held at bay the horrible diseases, the debilitating accidents, the rapists and murderers, snakes and spiders, hot kettles and irons, sharp knives and scissors, soft smothering pillows, electric
sockets, steep stairs, chewing gum, plate glass and fumes from gas fires which daily, minutely, threatened her daughter. Behind every kindly daily surface lurked death, black jaws agape. And Meg
was brisk and sensible and said cheerily, “Well, you can’t let it get you down, can you?” and was better in herself and happier than ever now, since they’d moved from
Railway Street.

But her enduring secret terror was that the black jaws would catch up with her Carolyn – and Carolyn’s perfection made it all the more likely. Jean’s remark made her want to
cry.

And of course she remembered it afterwards – luridly, hideously, knew it had been a warning and hated Jean. Only many months later did she remind Jean of her remark, and Jean, horrified,
cried, “But you know I didn’t mean – I never meant – you know how I go on. Oh Meg, I am sorry!”

The young couple on the corner were out doing their garden. Meg smiled and nodded at them and wondered how they felt about number four? That garden’s never been done since they moved in,
it’s a bit much when you try to keep the place nice and there’s weeds and rubbish spreading like wildfire from next door. Spoils the whole row, it does. She saw the front room windows
open and thought with pleasure of seeing Carolyn through the window – which she did as she turned in at the gate, Carolyn with her fair head down over her books. Meg turned her key in the
Yale, plumped the shopping down in the kitchen and went and collapsed on the sofa.

“This heat takes it out of me – it really does.”

Carolyn nodded without looking up. “Want some tea?”

“Please. Oh, Carolyn love, can you put that butter in my bag in the fridge? It’ll be running away.”

“Yup.” Standing up, Carolyn glanced at her mother, who had just prised her feet out of her shoes. The shoes had left red indented rims around the flesh, so the feet looked like
cakes newly turned out of tins.

After she had washed the tea things Carolyn went to her room to work, as she always did. Her Dad went out to the allotment as he always did, and her Mum sat watching telly, knitting, as she
always did.

Carolyn liked her room, even though it was small. It was pink and white and clean. There was appleblossom on the wallpaper which she had chosen, and she had made two patchwork cushions for her
bed, from pink and white flowered remnants. On the shelf above the bed were her foreign-costume dolls, each in its shiny Cellophane tube, and by the bed the poster of a baby polar bear and the one
of Cliff Richard that Mandy had given her. The carpet, from the old house, was beige and faded, but by her bed she had a white (washable) long-haired rug. Her Dad had made her a work top, out of
plastic wood, so she could study in her room. Opening her file, she bent her head over the intricate doodle on the inside cover, and started to add fine heart-shaped curlicues to the letters
A–L–A–N which were drawn in stars at the bottom of the page.

June 4 dawned hot again, but with a change, a closing in, of atmosphere. The sky at noon was metallic, and people felt in their heads a mounting pressure like rising irritation. The sky had
turned into a great hot mouth which closed down over them, exhaling stale used air, came closer as if to suffocate and swallow them. Finally, in the afternoon, the first full hot drops fell from
the sky – as if the sky itself was yielding to the great heat, and melting.

The first drips made big individual splotches on the school drive, and released smells of soil and cement. Then came lightning and very close thunder, and the rain began to fall more quickly, no
longer in drips but in lines, pelting down, drilling into the ground. Where they drove down on to concrete or tarmac they bounced up again, to a height of six inches. Through every window in the
school, children were looking out at the rain, transfixed. Carolyn, making Art History notes in the library, found her gaze irresistibly drawn to the window. Her friend Mandy was sitting beside
her. Mandy was plump, energetic and unafraid. She knew a lot about things that Carolyn didn’t, like religion and sex. She had been Born Again last year and it had weakened their friendship.
Mandy had gone all the way, and told Carolyn about johnnys. (“They sell them in Boots. You go and have a look – on the medicine counter, near the aspirins – anyone can buy
them!”) Where Mandy led, Carolyn sometimes followed, although she was becoming increasingly stubborn and at times dug her heels in and refused to listen to reason at all. She had done this,
to Mandy’s regret, over Jesus. They did not see much of each other outside school, since Mandy’s time was much absorbed by Jesus and her boyfriend George, and Carolyn’s mother
thought Mandy, with her tight jeans and loud voice, rather common.

“Coming out?” asked Mandy.

“In this?”

“Yes – it’s amazing in a storm, it’s like being under a really strong shower, it won’t be cold –”

“But we’ll get wet.”

Mandy pulled a face.

Carolyn hesitated. “Well – what are you doing – are you going home after?”

“‘Spect so. Yeah. Come on.”

“Um – I’ll ruin my sandals.”

“Don’t be so pathetic. You can dry them can’t you?”

“But my Mum –”

“Oh for God’s sake –”

Subdued, Carolyn neatly began to pack away her books. “Have you got a coat?”

“No, you berk, that’s the point.”

Carolyn nodded. Carefully she folded her mauve cardigan and tucked it away in her bag. ‘OK.”

Mandy led the way through the empty library, the quiet mid-lesson corridors, to B block door. They went through the first set of swing doors and stood staring through the second, listening to
the roar of the rain.

“You going to run?” asked Carolyn.

Mandy shrugged and laughed. “Come on.” She pushed the door and ran out into the rain. Carolyn watched her curly hair suddenly flatten to her head. Then she went out. It took your
breath away – not because it was cold, but because it fell so hard, stinging your bare skin, falling like blows on your head. Gasping and laughing, she and Mandy ran down the drive, half
blinded by the streams of water running down their faces. When Mandy cut off along the path home, Carolyn settled into a more carefully paced run, head down, mouth half open to breathe through. The
rain was running down her neck, inside her blouse, making her shudder. She looked up quickly, blinking, when she had to cross the road. At Leap Lane, which was one-way, she glanced only to the
left. As she jumped the flooded swirling gutter a noise made her swivel her head to the right where she took in instantaneously a red coming-closer wheel-splashing van and in mid-air time faltered, hesitated long enough for her to see herself and the red van hurtling forwards in a mad race to occupy the same spot of road, and herself still in mid-air suddenly
reversing her pumping legs like a cartoon character who’s run off a cliff and backpedals desperately – and all the revolving world of mother father Alan school Mandy all stopped still
like a frozen film, broken down oh no and she landed, stumbled – here no – not – me.

The lad driving the red Post Office van was in a state. It was the first time he’d done the collections on his own, and this bloody weather had fouled everything up.
Visibility was awful, he’d driven right past two boxes and had to go back for them, although he knew where they were. He was soaked to the skin and shivering, from fiddling with keys and
heaving sacks of letters out. He’d even dropped one and been scrabbling in the gutter for pale sodden envelopes, hoping no one had seen. He was very late. And all the roads looked different
in the rain – what you could see of them through this bloody windscreen, whose wipers moved at one sweep per minute. At a familiar junction he peered through the underwater screen and managed
to glimpse the main road, away up there to the left. So he turned left into the narrow empty lane and accelerated thankfully towards it. As he touched the brake to slow down, a thing jumped out of
the air from the left – and hit the van. Like lightning he hurled the van to the right, foot flat on the brake. When the van had slithered slowly across the road and stalled in a final
juddering jump, he could almost pretend he’d been quick enough – in minus timing – not to have hit it. Let it not be a person. Sitting in the blind streaming steamed-up van he was
oddly unable to move – got his right hand on to the door lever but couldn’t seem – didn’t seem to have any – force. He gave up after a bit and sat with his head
resting against the wheel, weak as water.

At last a policeman opened the door, asked if he was all right and pulled him out. An ambulance moved straight across in front of his eyes with blue lights flashing and a crowd of people’s
heads moved round towards him so it seemed everything was moving, slipping, sideways and he had to lean forward, supported by the policeman, to be sick which slipped away quickly too carried in
lumps by the swirling rain. When he was sitting down he said to the policeman, “Are they – are they –”

“What, are they what?” said the policeman patiently.

“Dead?”

“I don’t know sir,” said the policeman.

After the ambulances and crowd had gone, a policeman got into the red van and carefully wiped the steamy windows. He drove slowly the right way back down the street, muttering to himself,
“Bloody hell” at the slowness of the windscreen wipers.

The rain, driving down on to the convex gritty surface of the little lane, washed out and swirled away the last traces of the spreading red stain which Carolyn Tanner had made on the road.

Coming towards and from behind too is darkness pressing up against pressing hard hard I can see you blackness my eyes are wide open. It presses like a weight against the wide
open eyes hurting me, pressing till the eyes don’t take it in

not the sight of blackness extending in through the eye from outside to inside the head, not the eye a channel a hole for blackness to flow through no more

because pressed and squashed by insistent blackness it bursts to colours, each melting and oozing, flowing to the next, under the constant black pressure on the liquid film of
the eyeball. It shows purple with yellow glowing bars and flickers of red, pressing harder shows stars which melt to dribble down midnight blue with coloured shooting pains.

Carolyn found herself in a desert. It was breathtakingly beautiful. Bare sands stretched away to the far horizons, and the sky above was so pure that she looked straight
through it to outer space, to stars and planets and deep space beyond them. Everywhere was open and led the eye on. The air, she noticed with pleasure but without surprise, was fresh and cool.
People pretended deserts were hot. The flat sands were yellow as children’s seaside beaches. She saw that the desert was perfectly clean, as if it were new. Like a million sheets of blank
white paper, or a country covered by fresh snow, without a mark. But as she turned slowly around to take in the perfect remote circle of the horizon, she thought to herself that this was better
than paper, or snow. Paper would be written on, filled with words, each of which was one choice among thousands, and the combination of whose singular choices made one meaning among hundreds,
specific and limited. The writing would confine the blank paper, narrow all its possibilities down to one. And in the country where snow fell, children would rush out with boots and sledges and
criss-cross the white with tracks. Men, women and children, all of whom delight in making marks on white snow, in making their mark, would score and scar the snow, and desecrate its clean white
face. At least, she thought, the snow will melt.

But here in the desert the firm sand holds no marks. She imagined that she stood on the spot where the stone had proclaimed, “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings.” And all around
the lone and level sands stretch far away. Even his stumps of stone have gone.

She was happier than she had ever been, with a feeling of exultation like something growing and swelling inside her, joy, wanting to burst out, of her throat in singing, of her eyes in light, of
her body in dancing. Alone in the desert, she danced.

When she was tired she sat on the sand, which was firm and warm, like the reassuring touch of a friend’s hand. She was thirsty. Looking around she could see nothing to drink, and so she
started to walk. When she had walked for a while across the unmarked sand, she stopped and laughed. “You’re walking through a desert looking for water! What are you doing?”

And her own sensible head replied, “There is no water in deserts. You’ll die.”