Caedmon’s Song (10 page)

‘Can I help you?’ the assistant asked, coming out from behind her counter and raising her glasses.

‘No,’ Martha said, flashing her a quick smile. ‘Just browsing. I’ll find something.’

The woman went back to her paperwork and Martha carried on scanning the titles. She wanted an ordered world she could lose herself in for a while. Nothing modern would do; twentieth-century
literature, with its experiments in style, its self-conscious artistry and its lack of morality and order, had never much interested her. At one time she had liked to escape into the occasional
crime novel – Ruth Rendell, P. D. James – but such things held no appeal for her now. For a moment she considered
Moby Dick.
She had never read it, and the seaside, especially an
old whaling centre, would be the ideal place to start. But when she got to the Ms, she found they hadn’t a copy left in stock. The only Melville book they had was
Pierre,
and she was
in no mood for that. Finally, she settled for Jane Austen’s
Emma.
She had read it at school, for her A-Levels, but that seemed a lifetime ago. With Jane Austen, you could count on
nothing more to ruffle the ordered surface than an occasional social gaffe or mistaken romantic intentions.

What better to do, then, than spend an afternoon on the beach reading
Emma?
She just hoped Keith wasn’t there. He had said he was moving on, but he could have changed his mind.

She made her way back over the bridge. With the tide out, the River Esk was reduced to a narrow channel in the sand. Boats leaned in the silt at odd angles. Martha walked along St Ann’s
Staith, thinking of the old days in the photograph when the railing was made of wood. She passed the amusement arcades, seafood stalls and Dracula Museum, then at the end of Pier Road she took the
steps down to the beach.

Whitby Sands runs below West Cliff, and over the centuries, the sea has carved small caves and caverns in the sheer rock wall. Martha poked her head inside one. It didn’t go very deep, but
it was a dank, gloomy place, full of slimy rocks, smelly seaweed and dead, dried-out molluscs that crunched underfoot. She shivered and turned away.

The beach itself was crowded – only to be expected on such a fine day – but Martha managed to find a spot where she could lean back against the rock and stretch her feet out.
Children screamed and splashed in the water, bravely taking it in turns to stand fast as waves came in and bowled them over. Anxious parents kept one eye on the knitting or the newspaper, and the
other on the kids. Some children were busy constructing elaborate sandcastles with turrets, battlements, moats and drawbridges.

Some people were even sunbathing. A couple of teenage girls wearing skimpy bikinis lay flat out on towels. A group of boys about the same age, playing cricket nearby, kept hitting the ball in
their direction just to make an excuse to chat the girls up.

What Martha was watching, she realized, was another way of life, another world completely – or one she had once known but lost. If she felt like a visitor from outer space when she watched
lovers walk hand in hand, parents push babies in prams, and children play in the foam, she felt even more so when she watched the elaborate contact and courtship rituals of these teenagers bursting
with hormones.

The first couple of times the cricket ball kicked up a little sand on the girls’ bare stomachs, they responded with abuse. Anyone watching would think they didn’t like getting sand
in their navels. After a while, though, they started to join in the spirit of the game. They would pick up the ball and throw it towards the sea, or run off and bury it in the sand, laughing and
making fun of the boys. Martha had never before noticed the importance of sheer repetition and persistence in the human mating ritual.

It was like watching a species of animal or insect, Martha thought, putting Jane Austen aside and lighting a cigarette. No matter how much progress we seem to have made, we still dance to
primitive patterns so deeply imprinted that we wouldn’t recognize them if they tripped us up in the street. Which they often do. Though we have the miracle of language, we still make more
sense with meaningless sounds, gestures, looks and silences.

And beneath all the elaborate courtship rituals, Martha thought, lay pure animal desire and the scarcely recognized impulse to perpetuate the species. Just like Keith last night. He had wanted
Martha. He had wanted to take her to his bed naked and enter her for the pleasure it gave him. All that fuss over five minutes of grunting sounds – or was it squelching sounds? –
someone had once said. People would do anything for it: lie, cheat, steal, maim, kill, even die.

The whole human drama seemed so sad and pointless to Martha that day on the beach. People amounted to nothing more than puppets manipulated by forces they didn’t understand or, worse, even
perceive. Shakespeare was right, as usual— ‘As flies to wanton boys, are we to th’gods; They kill us for their sport.’ Martha included herself, too. Hadn’t she
experienced the ‘sport’ of the gods? And just how much choice did she really have in this tragedy or farce she was acting out? She was jumping to strings as much as anyone else.
Different strings, perhaps, with more sinister pullers, but beyond her control nonetheless. Despite the heat, she shivered.

Finally, she managed to pull herself out of the philosophical gloom. She told herself she was just getting nervous, that was all, and that the weak and cowardly part of her nature was trying to
sap her confidence. She had to be strong. It was no good giving in to a sense of futility; only one thing kept her going, and until that was done, she couldn’t afford to reflect on life.
Besides, who was she to make such judgements anyway?

She crossed her legs and picked up Jane Austen. It was a hot day on the beach, and there she lay in jeans and a shirt buttoned up to the neck. She was too warm, but she couldn’t take her
clothes off and lie almost naked like the teenage girls in their bikinis. And the rituals and consummation of courtship were beyond her, too. But for her, she thought, there was another kind of
consummation devoutly to be sought. And seek it she would. Tonight.

KIRSTEN

Like most people who hear bad news, Kirsten went through all the textbook stages, including the belief that a second opinion would prove the doctor wrong, and that what he had
told her was gone forever would somehow be miraculously restored. The first night, she convinced herself that it was all a bad dream; it would pass. But it didn’t. Even in the mild light of
the next morning everything was the same: her stitches, her aches, her wounds, her loss.

The nightmares of painless, almost bloodless, slashing and slicing continued. She never woke up screaming, but sometimes she would open her eyes suddenly at some ungodly hour of the morning to
escape the relentless images and to puzzle over them.

Other times, she lay awake all night. Especially when it was raining. She liked to try and empty her mind and pretend that her hard hospital bed was really a pallet of pine needles deep in the
woods behind her parents’ house in Brierley Coombe. The rain pattered gently on the leaves outside her window, and for short periods she could imagine it falling, soft and cool, on her
eyelids, and she could almost escape the horror of her condition.

At least she wasn’t dead. In a way, the doctor had been right: she was lucky. If that man hadn’t been walking his dog so late and hadn’t got curious when it started to growl
and scratch around in the shrubbery, then she would have simply bled to death on a summer’s night out in the park, only a hundred yards or so from home. But the man had stopped, and for that
she should be grateful.

Now she was a cripple with all her limbs intact – external limbs, anyway. Her sense of violation and loss was almost unbearable at times; that most intimate part of herself had been stolen
and destroyed. She cried, prayed and even, at one time, fell into a fit of hysterical laughter. But ultimately, she accepted the truth, and depression bore down on her. At its heart was that thick
cloud, an opaque mass swelling like a tumour in her mind, repelling all light and taunting her with its darkness and its heaviness.

The doctor and nurses ministered as best they could to her healing body. The stitches dissolved, leaving the flesh bunched up and corrugated around her breasts. Livid scars quartered her, like
the doctor had said, in the shape of a cross with a long vertical bar and a short horizontal, from just below the breasts to her pubic hair – at least to where that hair
had
been, for
the nurse had shaved her down there and now all she had was itchy stubble. Externally, the pubic region didn’t look too bad. She glimpsed it for the first time when she was able to walk to
the toilet alone. It was red and sore, covered in a lattice of fading stitchwork, but she had expected worse. It was inside where most of the damage had been done.

Her parents came in and out, her mother still too upset to say very much and her father taking the burden stoically. Superintendent Elswick dropped by again, but to no avail. She still
couldn’t remember what had happened or give them any information about her attacker, beyond the feel of his calloused hands.

Sarah visited again, too. She said she’d take on the small flat if Kirsten was going home to convalesce. Kirsten agreed. It would save a lot of trouble moving stuff when her parents took
her home. She didn’t tell Sarah about the full extent of her injuries. Maybe later. At that time, she couldn’t bear to talk about it. She did, though, ask her to try and keep the others
away for a while.

And then, a full week after she had been given the news, Galen turned up, breathless, from the station, lank dark hair flopping over his ears, concern etched in every feature of his thin,
handsome face. He sat beside her and grasped her hand. At first neither of them knew what to say.

‘I came before,’ Galen told her, finally. ‘They said you were unconscious and they didn’t know when you’d come round. I phoned every day. I couldn’t stay. My
. . .’

Kirsten squeezed his hand. ‘I know. I understand. Thank you for coming back.’

‘You look a lot better. How are you feeling?’

‘I can get up and walk around now. They tell me I’ll be able to go home soon.’ She touched her face gingerly. ‘The bruises have all gone now. The swelling’s gone
down.’ How much did he know about what had happened to her? She didn’t want to give anything away.

Galen lowered his head and shook it, his face darkening. He smashed his fist into his palm. ‘If I could get my hands on the bastard—’

‘Don’t,’ Kirsten said. ‘Just. . . don’t. I’d rather not talk about it.’

‘I’m sorry. You can’t imagine how I feel. I’ve been blaming myself ever since it happened. If only I’d been there, like I should have been.’

‘Don’t be silly. It’s not your fault. It could have happened to anyone at any time. You can’t be expected to guard me night and day.’

Galen looked into her eyes and smiled. His grip tightened on her hand. ‘I will from now on,’ he said. ‘After you’ve recovered and all that. I promise I won’t let
you out of my sight.’

Kirsten turned her head aside and looked out at the dazzling tower blocks rinsed by last night’s rain, and the sunlight dancing in the polished leaves. ‘What are you going to
do?’ she asked.

Galen shrugged. ‘I don’t really know. I suppose I’ll just hang about at home for the rest of the summer. Mother’s still taking it very badly – grandmother’s
death. And I’ll come and visit you in Brierley whenever I can. It’s not too far away and I’ll have the car.’

‘It might be better if you didn’t visit me,’ Kirsten said slowly. ‘At least, not for a while.’

Galen frowned and scratched his earlobe. ‘Why? What do you mean?’

‘Just that I need some time by myself, to recover.’ She managed a smile. ‘Call it post-operative depression. I wouldn’t be very good company.’

‘That doesn’t matter. You’ll need me, Kirstie. And I want to be there for you.’

She rested her free hand on his forearm. ‘No. Not for a while. Please. Just let me get myself sorted out.’

Galen got up and wandered over to the window, hands in pockets. His shoulders slumped the way they always did when he was disappointed about something. Just like a little boy, Kirsten
thought.

‘If you say so,’ he said, with his back to her. ‘I suppose it’s the . . . er . . . the psychological effects that are worse than even the physical ones, is it? I mean, I
don’t know. I couldn’t know, could I, being a man? But I’ll do my best to understand.’ He turned around again and looked at her.

‘I know you will,’ Kirsten said. ‘I just think it’s best if we don’t see each other for a while. I’m all confused.’

She still wasn’t sure how much they had told him. He knew that she’d been attacked, that was clear enough, but had they been vague about the nature of the assault? Perhaps he assumed
that she’d been raped. Had she been? Kirsten wasn’t too sure about that, herself. As far as the doctor had been able to make out, there had been no traces of semen in the vagina. It had
been such a mess, however, that she didn’t see how he could possibly be so certain. Did penetration by a short, sharply pointed metal object count as rape? she wondered. In the end, she just
had to settle for the general opinion that people who do what this man did to her are usually incapable of real sexual intercourse.

‘What about Toronto?’ Galen asked, returning to the chair and hunching over her.

‘I don’t know. I just can’t see myself going, not the way things are now. Not this year, at least.’

‘But it’s still a month or so off. You’ll probably feel better by then.’

‘Maybe. Anyway, you go ahead. Don’t worry about me.’

‘I wouldn’t go without you.’

‘Galen, don’t be so stubborn. There’s no point sacrificing your career because of me. I can’t promise you anything right now. I can’t even—’ And she
almost told him then, but pulled herself back just in time. ‘I just don’t know how things are going to go.’ She started crying. ‘Can’t you understand?’