By Joseph Pierson.
1.
We will see the murder and then, because we cut to now, four years later, we will assume the murder is the thing we need most to know about Jenny in order that her story makes sense, that it is appropriately contextualised, that her behaviour is motivated.
We can challenge this assumption by showing her in Agadir, for example, at night, walking along a sandy gravel layby towards a kiosk, brightly lit by the side of the road. She will buy a small box of tea, some almond paste and crackers, a bar of lavender soap and some chocolate. She will pass the transaction in casual French, pause on her way back to the hotel to listen to the crickets and the unseen tide. It will be hard to position this moment within the narrative which surrounds it, and that will be the point.
But because the murder is the most dramatic event we will show, we will position that event on her shoulder, so to speak, making this small isolated sequence in Morocco seem lonely and reflective, as though his death echoes in the long-drawn sound of the Atlantic, unseen through the darkness.
And if this frustrates her, we could allow such sequences to stand by themselves, isolated and peaceful, by not showing his death, nor remarking upon it, nor mentioning Aleisha and their travels togethers when the girl is released from prison. Which would make the subsequent revelation of his death cast its pall, retrospectively, over all that came before, like a sudden breaker dissolving as it retreats across the sand.
And then they have a couch, in petrol blue, and she is sitting on it.
She washes her feet in the sink, closes the pub and says goodnight to the staff, locking the front door after them. She turns off the lights then pours herself a half and sits at the bar in the dark.
A Church in Dulwich, south London. The dim shadow of a deity that she never goes near or interrogates. Light pours down on her from the stained window. Fervour. She is one of the elect. The preacher speaks with his fists. The empty chair in front of hers, a tight knot in the wood of its back. The boy’s silence beside her.
Later, the five-point stars on Giotto’s frescoes. Padua. The boy points out two panels. The Last Supper, the evening of Christ’s betrayal, directly below the birth, the one guaranteeing the other. He was betrayed because he was born.
Later, St Ives. She wakes early. The green Atlantic there beyond the window. A sheet of wavering rain out at sea, a tepid rainbow smeared across the view. She leaves him sleeping. The scoured tang of the salt smell, a gritty freshness. The flat beach gently declines towards a pleated tide, tight breakers fizzing across the sand. The clouds disperse. The rain clears. He is sitting on the terrace with breakfast on the table, a plate of eggs, a French press. He flattens the newspaper as the wind threatens the front page and says, Coffee’s getting cold. She puts a palm under the cup and looks behind herself, out to sea. He says, I will see the Barbara Hepworth sculptures today. She sits. She can see that he wants to hold forth, that an inspired parallel has gently landed upon him while he gazed out to sea, alone, watching her walk towards him. Bees in the frail pink flowers and two older men playing bowls on the lawn. The texture of the morning, the shape of her memories, has changed, dissipated. The sky is empty and blue. And then, like a trapdoor opening beneath her: I am getting older, she thinks. It is a fact, like a closed door. Maybe I will stay in the room, she says. You don’t want to explore? No, she says. You go look at your sculptures. I will sleep.
The dim shadow of a deity moves over the water.
Overlaying Jennifer tidying the bar, wiping away the ring-stains, tossing lemon slices into the bin, could be the memory of another, of a girl clearing the floor or an old boy at the couches, a subtly shifting montage making a brief ensemble of what was this tight, constricted chamber piece. Or perhaps we use this opening to widen the narrative still further, exaggerating these reflections on time and its passing, by overlaying an image of Jennifer thirty, forty, fifty years hence, in Paris or Budapest or east London, turning over a folded paper on a worktop as she looks beyond the windows to a line of conifers as they swell and breathe and in the wind.
But there is something meditative and, finally, redemptive in repetition. She closes the pub. The kids come and go. An accumulation for the sake of accumulation, each moment laid carefully over the last, generating a richness that is its own satisfaction.
There is, of course, a flash of imagery, burnt on her retina like the afterimage of a naked bulb. He backs up, hands raised. The dull thud of Aleisha’s punches. He falls. The glow of the awning on a petrol station forecourt. Shame.
The fires have burnt themselves out and warm oceans swell and recede. Smooth, black, palm-sized tablets wash up on a desecrated shoreline, dead phones reflecting the bald white light of a naked sun. Further, to the bloating star, a red giant engulfing planets, melting the mountain-hard ice on Jupiter’s Europa, loosing the bonds of carbon chemistry that new biology may merge and split.
She puts a crimson prayer-cushion on her lap and looks at the vaulted ceiling. Nothing comes.
All this sitting down in churches, says Aleisha. Are you trying to encourage some kind of spiritual awakening? What would be wrong with that? says Jenny.
Three columns, a fifth of the page. Sustained, brutal and remorseless. She folds the paper. The trains are slow because of the heat. She is at New Cross. She is twenty-six. He was thirty-one. Numerically, she will cleave free of him. Something incontrovertible – he will always be older than me – is no longer true, and that fact sits like a puzzle in her mind. Strange, disorientating games like this occupy her often.
At a certain point in the court proceedings she loses all interest, it seems like a game they are playing, moving around pieces that are not real, that are just abstract conceptions that they each attack, pare, and reframe. There is no need to work out what happened, as there is no way of doing so.
She runs for the train, gets on just as the doors close and sits on the floor between two carriages. It is late, she’s beat, she is tired of washing her feet in the sink after work, balling her socks in toilet roll and tossing them in her bag, tired of lights up, last orders. She decides that she will not let her life pass by like this, that she will quit her job, that she will not measure the weeks by the quiet Sundays when she sits with the staff by the windows after shift wrapping cutlery, sharing a bottle of wine, developing subtle friendships that last as long as these kids stay in the job, a few months, a year, watching her fingers work neatly, practiced, until it is time for her to rotate her wrist, check the time, say, Okay. That will do.
The past doesn’t exist, says Aleisha.
She tells it back to herself: Her partner is murdered and four years later…
The commentary stalls, attempting to analyse Aleisha through her lack of self-analysis, suggesting that Aleisha’s honesty comes from never attempting to explain herself, and thereby never attempting to convince herself or others that she knows why she does what she does.
Innocence:
So we might characterise her story.
They shake hands. Jennifer gives her a cigarette and they walk to the bus stop. It is a brisk day in October. What are you thinking? she asks. Aleisha shrugs one shoulder, flicks her cigarette into the road and sits on the sloping bench seat. My mum, she says. After a while Aleisha stands and looks at the bus timetable. Funny, she says. This morning I felt like I could sit at a bus stop for days. Now I’m impatient. Not that I thought about the bus stop this morning. The bus takes them to Lewisham. Aleisha goes to sign in and speak to her parole officer and Jennifer sits in a Turkish café and looks through a paper. When Aleisha joins her, they go out to the street. It’s getting dark. The shops are closed, the stalls dismantled, a skinny old man sweeping the street with a wide broom, old fruit piled up near the bins. A drink? says Aleisha. I don’t mind, says Jenny. After the second, Aleisha says, Did you want something from me? She is looking at her hands, then she looks Jenny straight in the eye. The bitterness and spite Jenny knew in her has changed into something far less captivating. No, says Jenny. I thought I’d ask you what it was like. Prison? says Aleisha. No, says Jenny. Killing him. Watching him die. I didn’t watch him die, says Aleisha. It was a fight. I’d been fighting with everyone. I didn’t think much of it. I just went back in the house and drank more. Next thing I knew it was almost morning, I was being folded into a police car, kicking and screaming. They told me it was murder in the car but I didn’t pay any attention, it didn’t mean anything. Later, I used to dream about swinging that club. In the dream I couldn’t understand how it was possible that you could do one thing, swing a club, and kill someone, and I’d be swinging it without swinging it, hitting him without hitting him. Like I could not kill him even though I had. Pause. Is that what you wanted? Is it true? says Jenny. Is what true? That I dreamt? Yes. I had dreams. I dreamed about my daughter. I dreamed lots of things. Aleisha shrugs, looks away, says, The past doesn’t exist. I know that, says Jenny. Aleisha finishes her pint and looks at Jenny as if to say, You getting me another?
The people continue, acclaiming.
It is only when they are queueing at departures that Jennifer panics. What if you are held? she says. My passport won’t be flagged, says Aleisha. I am not a flight risk. Why not? I am not the sort to leave the country. Aleisha resists and complains at every stage of the check-in, and by doing so she makes the whole process seem inhumane. Put this here, take that off. Stop. Walk forward. Raise your arms. Remove your belt. So now I won’t see my case until we get to Bulgaria? Yes, says Jenny. And you trust these people? Light-pocketed, they sit in Frankie and Bennie’s and order beers and a basket of fries. The cheap superiority Jennifer feels. My partner and I were in Italy, thinks Jenny. When we were in Florence, she could say. And then they are descending through ragged clouds, a foreign city taking shape beneath them.
The light is pink. Poplars. An espresso and a cigarette. A vulgar penthouse duplex on the top floor of a Soviet block, a jacuzzi in the bedroom, a huge projector screen beside the bed. Sofia spread out below the rooftop terrace, the darkness democratising its glittering lights so that this could be the view of any major city.
You could come with me, says Jenny, and you won’t get arrested when you come back because you won’t come back. It is not possible to disappear, says Aleisha. And all that happens when you try is you run face-first into a bunch of tired clichés. Such as – she flicks out a finger – you cannot run away from yourself. Pause. Anything else? No, says Aleisha. That’s all there is to say.
And to think, she says. Yesterday we were in London. That’s what I like about being abroad, says Jenny. That sense of displacement, being detached from normality. The feeling of being elsewhere. Baby, says A. I felt like that my whole life. She kisses Jenny on the forehead, flicks her cigarette off the roof and puts back her wine.
She says this often: Baby. We only have to give it to her two or three times before this is something she says. It allows us to get a handle on her, to extrapolate from it her punky insouciance, her dangerous cool. Baby, let’s get the fuck out of here.
Aleisha looks at herself in the mirror and feels nothing like the sort of person who would say that. Far easier, however, far less challenging for all involved, if I just tell you that Aleisha is the sort of person who says and does these sorts of things.
A flight of iron steps up to a rooftop veranda. Night hides the mountains. Aleisha clambers up with a mud-coloured drink in a tall plastic beaker, assembled from the mess of designer spirits cluttering the sideboard. So, she says, na zdrowie! That’s Polish, says Jenny. And where are we? Aleisha stands at the railings beside her. Traffic. Dogs calling back and forth. They both, perhaps, try to cultivate a feeling of longing for that which is just beyond reach, whose promise is anyway vague and unsatisfying, intensifying the ache. Aleisha spits over the railing. Drunk, they climb down from the rooftop, Aleisha in front. A swift kick and that would be that. She would fold over herself, tumble forwards, flinging her cup, a hand smacking the banister before her head cracks on the tiles.
A basilica. A thin votive candle, a bent knee, the gesture somewhere between a curtsey and a supplication. Aleisha sits on a bench against the wall massaging a heel. You feel anything? she asks. No, says Jenny. Nothing. Impossible to be pious with this woman in tow. How hollow does that make her veneration? How abstract? I will try to love you, she thinks, as Aleisha replaces her shoe and leans her elbows on her knees. Jenny lights her slender candle, kneels on the floor, earnest, honest, and projects an echo without an originating utterance to whatever she is kneeling before, sending out an absence, a voided cavity.
Aleisha is a good driver, sharp, observant, confident. She drives skilfully up the mountains then dips the clutch and coasts down.
What is your attraction to these roadside kiosks? Jars of honey on trestle tables, trinkets, patient stallholders hunched below mountains, watching without much hope – without a lack of hope either; indifferent as the stones – as she fingers a rosary, a carved Bulgaria or Slovakia or Ljubljana sign.
Pauses on the way from nowhere to nowhere, periods of rest that are abstractions from any kind of narrative. The excised frames from a tightly composed narrative. Loosed of the mechanics, of the need to justify themselves, such sequences have a relaxed, nowhere charm to them, like meditations or secret good deeds.
They pull over in the mountains and follow a trail to a monastery, the path littered with the usual wares. Aleisha makes them stop at a kiosk selling knives and bats and she buys a plastic Kalashnikov and plants the butt in the dirt as she leads them off trail, up a steep dense slope between the pines. Jennifer lags behind, comes clear on a promontory with clean stone paving leading to a courtyard bounded by a pale stone monastery, three stories high, open-air walkways with ornate rugs slung over the railings. Aleisha jumps out of the bushes firing her rifle. Dead, she says.
All this sitting down in churches, says A. Are you trying to encourage some kind of spiritual awakening?
Aleisha rarely wears shoes. She climbs mountain paths barefoot, pads around churches. Why is it, says Jenny, driving, the mountainous roads winding endlessly, that you never wear shoes? I was never domesticated, says A. So how do you incorporate me into your schemes? What schemes? asks Jenny. You take me to churches, says Aleisha, light a candle, bend a knee, look reverently at these flat paintings, as though devoted to something. And what about me? Where do I fit? They stay by a river, a complex of wooden shacks on the side of a mountain, connected by dizzying stairwells and landings of slippery decking. Aleisha washes her face at the sink, changes her shirt and leaves the room. Jennifer hears the car start up and five hours later Aleisha wakes her, covered in blood, the palms of her hands raw, jeans muddied. Go back to sleep, she says. The car? It’s fine, says Aleisha. Jennifer watches her kick her jeans to the corner and sit on the edge of the narrow twin bed. Aleisha looks at her hands then licks her raw palms, one after the other. She looks up at the ceiling. She yawns. She lays down and pulls her knees to her chest, her breath evening-out, deepening, asleep, while Jennifer lays here in the dark, closed out of her own sleep by this contented, bloodied animal curled up across from her.
Aleisha lets a switch of hazel ping back and spank Jenny on the forehead. Sorry, she says. After that she is more careful. She holds branches out of the way – You got it? – and Jennifer is touched, and then she despises herself for the feeling, for these morsels of compassion that Aleisha indulges in, the way she sometimes dresses up pretty to get fall-down drunk.
Jennifer babysits her as they criss-cross Europe.
The road fractures and turns to gravel. A few low-roofed wonky houses and, at the top of a steep bend, a bright pine fence surrounding the guesthouse, its white paint dazzling under a scorched blue sky. Their host – Peter – greets them at the gate, shakes their hands, and Aleisha walks off around the veranda, lighting a cigarette, toeing a couple of chickens, leaving Jenifer – as usual! – to check in. Peter takes her to the reception area, which is a small room with four square dining tables, a fridge full of beer, a TV up on the wall playing Italo disco. Twin beds on the top floor, the room neat, small, thoughtfully decorated. A screen over the window puts a gauze in front of the view, the mesh so fine it seems to disappear and reappear depending on where you stand. Jenny unpacks. Aleisha washes her face and neck at the sink, splashing water all over the place. They follow Peter’s directions off-road, over a collapsed fence into a broad meadow with hills in front, a narrow path alongside the high grass until a dramatically sculpted series of cliffs in dusty orange arkose. The views are spectacular. They get back late but the light is holding and Peter is sitting in the dining room with a beer, skinny legs crossed, a cigarette in the ashtray. He is delighted to see them. What did you think? It’s lovely, says Jenny. Yeah, says A., taking a beer from the fridge. You mind? Please, says Peter. Your home is my home. Aleisha turns her finger as if to say, Other way. Yes, he says, palming his forehead. My home is yours. Is what I meant. There’s a till on the counter. Aleisha nods at it while Peter turns off the telly. They get drunk. Jenny goes to bed and Aleisha wakes her up with a knife at her throat. You think we’re friends, she’s saying. Don’t you. Jenny carefully slides her hand up the duvet and holds Aleisha’s thin wrist. The knife presses closer. Aleisha lets go, stands, flicks on the light and dashes a handful of notes on the floor. You stole his money. Thief! No, says Jenny. You have to give it back. Aleisha picks up the ashtray from her bedside table and clocks Jenny round the head with it, the blow ringing her ears, smashing her eyesight into jagged splinters. Glass scatters across the room. A hand at her face. Aleisha turns to the bathroom, throws the knife into the dimness, grabs Jenny’s wrist and makes her stand. Jenny’s head is heavy, she is looking at the floor, at Aleisha’s grubby feet, watching thin blood patter all over the laminate. Look at me, says A. She does. She wipes her eyes clear, blinks, sways. Peter knocks on the door, lets himself in, and Jenny lets her knees give and sits on the bed. Tell him! Tell him you stole his money! says A. Thief! Fucking thief! Peter goes calmly to the bathroom, comes back with a towel and kneels in front of her. Here, he says. Press this to your head. She does. He picks up the money. No harm done, he says. You need a paramedic? No, says Jenny. She cleans up the glass while Aleisha sits on the terrace watching the purple night, listening to the crickets and the braying of a donkey. Jennifer pulls the glass from her hair and wipes up her own blood.
She crosses the river and heads into Pest along an uneven cobbled street that is quickly empty until, through the mist, a marching band approaches, the soldiers dressed in the tunics and hats of the Austro-Hungarian army, a trumpeter in the lead, a short fat man at the back of the line with a large drum on its side, hooked round his neck on a rope. She watches them pass. Thickening fog smudges the environs. She is lost, I guess. She wanders for a long time, finds an all-night bar, orders a coffee and something to eat and tries to sober up.
The traffic is rough and a huge Novotel stares at her from across the Vltava. Aleisha is nowhere to be seen. She heads down Na Prorici, away from the river, towards the Old Town, and, like that, miraculous, she sees Aleisha standing in front of the Opera House smoking a cigarette. She takes her by the elbow and Aleisha lets herself be led.
Get up, she says. Come with me. She puts on her nightgown and follows Aleisha down the corridor, to the kitchen, a half-empty bottle of brandy on the radiator. The timeline fragments. Aleisha takes a bread knife from the drawer, turns to Jennifer and says, matter-of-factly, I’m gonna do you in. And then I’m gonna walk off into the sunset. She goes at her with the knife. At some point, Jenny falls, slips in her own blood or faints. She’s against the cupboards now anyway, on the floor, and Aleisha pushes one shoulder with her foot, laying Jenny flat on her back. Jenny gasps, the pain turns her inside out, then evens off. She lays still. She watches Aleisha’s feet. She looks at the honeycomb floor tiles. Aleisha drops the knife in the sink, opens the back door and stands on the step picking her grubby fingernails with a teaspoon. She washes her face in the sink, finishes the wine, leaves the flat and walks through the back streets towards the Old Kent Road.
They take the concrete steps, narrow, winding, up to the top floor. Like an open prison, says the girl, as they step over a mattress and she raps the back of her hand at the door. Someone opens the door then drifts away and Aleisha follows the woman to a gutted front room, burnt-down red candles stuck on tea plates on the windowsill. They drink and get high together, and by the time she heads back out it’s middle of the afternoon, the light smothered, and she sits on the wall out front the church, bumps some of the shitty coke they left her with and drinks the last of the beers. An old bill car parks obliquely in the middle of the road, the driver gets out and walks behind the car, arm up, stopping the traffic, while two others walk towards her, guns raised, shouting, Down! Down on the ground! She slides off the wall. Sirens approach from the opposite direction, so she holds up her hands and lowers herself to her knees.
2.
Jenny drives through the mountains towards Paradise Valley. She pulls over. A goatherd squats under a dead cypress. Jenny raises a hand. She listens to the careful sound of her own footsteps as she walks off road, into the mountains. A bell tinkles as an old goat lifts its head.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Joseph Pierson has a PhD in Creative Writing from Kingston University. His stories have been published in Ambit, Litro, Minor Lit[s] and Shooter Magazine. He won the 2020 Peggy Chapman Andrews First Novel Award.
