The Twisted Heart (2 page)

Kit walked over and propped herself up against the pockmarked wall, closing her eyes as small defence against a sudden but not surprising fit of light-headedness. Most people had shuffled towards the back to drink water they'd brought with them. The noise of those who knew each other or were just friendly covered the silence of those who didn't or weren't—a mash of sound that receded crazily fast as Kit bent, crouched, slid floorwards, head tipped between her knees, afraid she might be pitching into a faint.

When she had sufficiently recovered—it was only a few seconds, and she was used to the brief descent of this somehow razorish fog—she hauled herself back up onto her feet and passed amongst the others, shaken still, but aware of their ironical comments, their complaints, their readjusting of garments and fanning of faces. Kit went to her bag, picked it up, looked inside it for no accountable reason, and then quietly, downheartedly, slipped away.

It hadn't been like any dance club she had ever heard about or seen represented on screen, or, indeed, dreamed of.
On the contrary, the place had felt borderline hostile, not to mention its being so badly organised. There were all sorts of reasons to leave, yet the one most acceptable to her, irritatingly enough, was the fact that she had been the tallest person there; not by much, but even so.

She had noticed it at once, and had had the duration of the first hour to get over it. Easy to say that it couldn't have mattered less. In some part of her mind she
had
said this to herself, for an hour.

Then she'd left.

Outside on the hall steps, Kit shivered. It was cooler now and her own heat was largely expended. She decided to salvage the evening by fitting in a short stint at the library. Pams Cafe, where in virtual solitude she had sat out the previous hour of her life for the price of a sandwich and two cups of tea, had transformed itself into the strip-lit refuge of four, five, six huddled figures.

Kit walked up the street, drooped against the bus stop and stared back at them, and it came to her abruptly that of everyone on the Ontario-criminals name list, it was Jessie Keith, a child one day cut into pieces and then in some appalling fashion raped, who had best exemplified the name,
Meta Cherry
. In the act of forming this thought—too late, that is—Kit wished her mind would leave words alone where words didn't serve.

The scene through the café window, plus the window itself, scattered over with special offers handwritten on dayglo stars, looked like a black-and-white photograph, ‘Useless People at Twilight', that happened to have come out in colour.
Who were they all, Kit wondered, these wasters? She stared at them, annoyed, until two of them started to laugh, at which she was pierced by a sense of her own loneliness. Oh yes, she thought, more annoyed still, and isn't this just exactly the kind of moment where you're supposed to ask, ‘What is life for?'

While she was busy replying to herself that this was a question she was unqualified to address, she was startled by a hand on her arm, ‘You off then?' She—a man had taken hold of her, nondescript, tough, thin, Kit only peripherally looked at him—crop-haired, a not-quite-youngish man.

He let go.

Kit said, ‘I'm just catching the bus,' and looked back at the café, at the laughing people inside it, at the sun-bleached, illustrated menu, green and orange dayglo stars. She looked around at the street, at the world, at the rest of the world, at a cyclist, a graffitied dustbin, a kid opposite who—

‘You're okay, are you?'

—a kid opposite who was walking along with odd, stiff, jolly, deliberate steps.

The man hesitated then tried again. ‘Were you thinking of coming back next week?'

Not now, I'm not, thought Kit, though she hadn't been planning to anyway.

‘I was hoping I might get a chance to dance with you,' he said. ‘You were—you didn't want to try out with a partner?'

Kit felt got at. She was a definite pip taller than him. She drew herself up. She muttered, ‘I don't know, I have to be off.' As she had just left the hall, wasn't that pretty obvious?

‘Might you make it next time, do you think?' he asked.

‘If I can,' she said, gracelessly.

‘Joe,' he said, and held out the hand with which he had notionally detained her.

She shook hands—how could she not?—and seemed to remember hearing that blind people judged the beauty of strangers by the feel of their hands. What did his hand feel like? He was nondescript, tough. His hand was nondescript, tough. It meant nothing to her. What might her hand feel like, come to think of it, to him? Nothing, also?

‘Kit,' she replied.

‘Kit?'

‘
Kit
,' she said, more distinctly. Perhaps he wasn't nondescript after all. Tough though, yes. There was about him a certain—what? He caught her eye, smiled and turned away, and walked away back towards the hall.

On the short return bus ride down the hill to town, Kit felt furious. She often thought about joining this or that club, society, about attending events, getting out, meeting people. She would think about it, would revolve the idea in her mind, would feel she had understood whatever it was she wished to understand, and would then proceed to remain at home. The scheme of a dance club, of really going to one—the fact that she had done it had been an exception.

Now, trailing along in the traffic past the drearily colourful little Cowley Road shops, murals, tawdry and decayed; now, sitting on the bus in a bad mood, it felt to Kit as though she had left the dance class expressly to avoid, as he had said
he was called,
Joe
; though the fact was, she hadn't known he existed until after she'd got outside. She wished she had walked back down into town, he wouldn't have caught up with her then; but she had wanted, and did want, to fit in time at the library, and it was late.

For an instant what felt like another hand settled lightly on her head, the gesture of a priest. But it turned out to be the elbow of a young man who, as he walked past her seat, paused to get the zip up on his jacket. Kit shook herself, faintly disgusted.

She had left the club because she'd been too tall, and because she'd had the sense that depression was gathering, not within her exactly, but at the edges of the experience. She had had the powerful sense that if she didn't get out while the going was good, it would cease to be good; that the going barely was good, in fact—was pretty weird, you might say—but that the thing was still at a stage where it would be possible to think about it afterwards as having been good, maybe, viewed in retrospect; the stamping, for example, humorous. She could still be funny about it speaking to someone who hadn't been there, about the self-regarding boys and the girls with their glue-hard hair—if she chose, and had anyone to speak
to
.

Had she stayed, however, she didn't doubt that she would very soon have reached the point where going to a dance club would have seemed like something she should have known from the start was a mistake, a girl like her, going to a dance club off up out eastwards from town. It almost felt like a mistake now, either despite her having been asked back, or because of it—because he, so-called
Joe
, had made
her wonder really why she had gone: Joe. He had looked capable; but capable of what, she had no idea.

When the bus reached the High Street, Kit walked along the aisle from the back to the middle exit, stooping to pick up a wallet-sized zip bag that lay on the floor. Ahead, the Queen Street stop was already blocked by several other buses, so Kit's driver pulled up short. Kit made a hasty offer of the bag to the nearest passenger, a woman, who took it from her in confusion. ‘Oh my God,' she said, then, ‘Thanks. You're a star.'

The driver bent round to see what was happening. Kit scowled back at him.

As she ran over the High Street she said to herself, you're a star.
You're a star!

She loped up the Old Bodleian Library's main staircase two steps at a time. These steps always felt wrong to her. She assumed their dimensions had been worked out so far in the past that even tall people had been short then. At any rate, one step at a time reduced her to mincing her way up, while two required an over-long stretch, and what she considered uncouth athleticism.

Happily, going down was different. Unless she was positively unwell, Kit liked to rush down this staircase one step at a time as fast as possible, giving her a buzz akin to riffling her thumb through a 900-page paperback.

She had ordered for herself, on a whim, two different editions of the novel
Eugene Aram
, based on the life of a real murderer, and written by Dickens's friend, Bulwer
Lytton. She also expected to find waiting in her name a clutch of W.S. Hayward's so-so erotic novels. These Kit had ordered from the library's low-frequency storage dump in case there was any merit in recommending them to her sole student, Orson McMurphy, whose name, she now realised, made him sound rather like a late nineteenth-century Ontario cattle thief.

Kit slipped through the swing doors of the upper reading room and attempted to walk noiselessly across its exasperating cork floor. She didn't want to draw attention to herself, not that it was any big deal. Who spent their Friday nights in the library before the start of a new academic year? Outcasts and lunatics, was her answer to this question, or more bracingly, those with nothing better to do.

She strolled light-footed past the ranks of vast work tables, towards the issue desks, about to have to retrieve a stack of mid-Victorian erotica, oh dear. She had long since stopped needing to give the librarians her name. They recognised her as ‘Farr, Christine Iris', and would hand her her books in silence. The regular librarians, Kit thought, were like barmaids to her mind, with the upper reading room her favourite mental watering hole. What'll it be tonight? I'll take a half of Bulwer Lytton with a low-grade erotica chaser, thanks. And what did the librarians care? They didn't care. Would they even know what the books were? Presumably not. Nevertheless,
The Soiled Dove, Skittles in Paris,
Anonyma
.

The reading room was calm and warm, peaceful, concentrated, enclosed by the vision of nightfall. The great windows
glittered where light from the ceiling lamps reflected off the insides of the panes. Kit took seat 103 and stared out through the glass at the looming roofline of huge, ancient buildings, each one caught in its own dense dose of sickish electric glare.

She was back in a good mood because she had questions in her head that intrigued her to which she was about to find out a few answers. What a blessing so much of the trash she wished to consult had survived the purges of well-informed librarians long ago.
The Soiled Dove
, though, 1865, oh God, she thought.

It proved to be a pathetic story. The Honourable Plaistow Cunninghame liked to arrange fake wedding ceremonies for himself, performed by his good friend Black, and would then debauch his latest supposed bride for as long as she amused him—so far, so hackneyed. His career had reportedly begun with the apple-cheeked, country-girl type, figured in the person of Dolly Dimsdale; but at the novel's start he could be found upgrading to the sweet-natured and well-bred, though inadequately protected heroine, Laura Merrivale. How enchanting when she remarks, ‘Papa says I am playful.'

Kit whisked her way through three hundred pages of wickedness to the point where Cunninghame, in a contrary and drink-sozzled fit, had been reduced to hurling himself out of an upper-storey window, with the conclusive result, the next sentence, that his ‘brains bespattered the roadway'. And a couple of pages after
that
, there was Laura Merrivale frozen to death on a bench in the Mall at half past three in the morning. Tough for both of them, but quite a thrill for the reader.

Hayward's last word on the subject, which Kit scribbled down in her notebook, was, ‘Life exposes those who enjoy it to many vicissitudes.' In brackets, she added childishly, ‘On the other hand, life's just wonderful for those who don't enjoy it, right?' There was one other quote, regarding the Honourable Plaistow Cunninghame, that she couldn't resist: ‘He had commenced his holocaust to the Moloch of lust when he was very young, for he was naturally depraved and vicious.'

Kit rolled this phrase luxuriously around her mind. A middle-aged man squeaked across the cork tiles behind her, a reader coughed, a couple of people murmured a greeting. How many of them, she wondered, were contemplating in their blood some small contribution, quite soon—that night preferably—towards their own little holocaust to the Moloch of lust?

And so immediately did she form a reply to this question, if not quite an answer, that she found herself mouthing, ‘You take your chances.' Kit glanced sideways, having talked to herself, to see whether anyone was perhaps observing her, around or over the wooden screen fixed along the centre of her table. What her eyes finally met, however, was the reading room clock. She didn't want to be chased out when the place closed for the night. No more time for Skittles and Anonyma, with their merry vales and dim dales—the erotics of deluded consent. It was more urgent that she press on with Bulwer Lytton and his attempts to justify exploiting in fiction the case of an infamous, true-life murderer.

She opened the earlier edition of his novel, 1831, and read the preface at speed. Eugene Aram, though he had, yes, been a killer, had also been a scholarly gentleman, hence neither
a ‘vulgar ruffian', nor a ‘profligate knave'. In other words, Aram had been no dismal, commonplace,
ordinary
murderer, but an intriguing ‘anomaly', fine, well, nothing new in that argument.

Kit slowed her pace, read properly, compared the earlier with the later preface, jotted down a few notes, felt an abrupt burst of fatigue, jumped up, handed her books back in, and wondered, ashamed, what Hayward would have made of the name, ‘Fanny Price'. As she skimmed down the Bodleian stairs, she recalled the frame of mind she'd been in coming up them and thought, this is a silly existence I'm leading—which was fine so long as she didn't care.