Requiem Excerpt
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Chapter Two Tom climbed, shivering, into bed before falling asleep. When he woke it was after six, and he wasrelieved that this time his sleep hadn't been disturbed. He tried to telephone Sharon. The call hoooked up with the single ringing tone of an international line, but no one answered. He'd not spoken to Sharon in some months. He put his hand in his pocket, feeling for the scrap of paper he'd discovered in his desk at school: This fleeting life... Upstairs in the spare bedroom was an ottoman, a chest for storing blankets that had become a shrine to his dead wife. It contained all the things that he didn't want hanging around the house but couldn't bear to throw away. Photographs, letters, theater programs, ornaments with special resonance, even an answerphone tape with her voice on it. Each object cold and remote, as useless and beautiful as a moon rock. He slipped the note into a wallet full of other papers. Opening this chest was a dangerous business; when the lid was lifted, the evening could be swallowed up with the contents spread across the floor as he emptied a bottle of Scotch. Here's one piece of moon rock, one that holds him in a trancelike gaze for some minutes: a photograph, taken on a bracing east-coast beach. As Tom holds it before him the slender white border of the photograph extends outwards, dissolves and the two subjects break their pose. One of the figures is Katie, a pretty woman but with her mouth set hard against some bitterness. The other person is Tom. It is a recent photograph. The hulk of a wreck lies in the background of the shot. They have taken a long weekend--Tom's idea--at an east-coast resort to see if they can repair the damage. Tom collects his camera from, and thanks, the passing stranger who agreed to take a photograph of the pair. They turn away and walk up the beach toward the wreck, crunching pebbles underfoot as they go. Both the sea and the sky have turned the color of cold steel. it is well out of season, and a squall at sea has churned up the waves, sending a stiff wind at right angles to the beach. They have to turn their collars up to stop the wind from whipping sand in their faces. "I just hope it's not too late," she says. He rounds on her, scattering shingle, holding on to the lapels of her coat. "It was a mistake. We both know it. It can be put right." "I hope you're right, Tom," she says, the wind lashing her blond fringe across her eyes. "Because I think the time has gone." Then she turns and walks up the beach, saying something about getting her things ready to go, but he doesn't hear her properly because the wind blows the words from her lips like flecks of foam from the waves. He walks on up the beach a little further, to where the wreck lies beached and on its side, doomed a century ago on a spit of sand. Tom sits down on the rotting hulk. A solitary gray-backed gull bobbing on the gray ocean under the gray sky cries, "Hark!" before flying off. A wave pounds at the shingle beach. The scene dissolves, reconstituting itself in its original deception, a holidaying twosome, fixed forever by celluloid and photochemicals, the picture in Tom's hand. Moon rock. The ottoman was full of it. If the circumstances of Katie's death had been different, he might have been able to bury her properly. But the freak nature of the accident had left him nursing a terrible sense of injustice. A storm had uprooted a tree, which had collapsed on, and crushed, her car. Katie was killed instantly. If she'd died in an ordinary road accident, Tom would at least have been able to attribute the tragedy to human or mechanical error--similarly if she'd died in a plane crash or a fire. The rage adn the blame would still have been there, of course, but what he couldn't tolerate was the utter randomness of the incident. No mistake. No error. Just one parcel of nature destroying another through the accident of proximity. Tom could have understood a disease in terms of its predatory function, or an environmental disaster like an earthquake or flood in terms of its scale. But one tree falling on one car? No: it felt personal. It felt directed, against him. A finger of judgment. He lowered the lid of the ottoman. Then he tried Sharon's number again. Still no answer. He wondered what the time difference was. Perhaps no more than an hour or two. Katie had not at first approved of his enduring friendship with Sharon, whom he had known since college days. "Old flames should be snuffed out," she'd said. "Would you like it if I dredged up some of my old boyfriends every other month?" "We shouldn't have to lose touch with someone we once loved just because we now love someone else." "It just seems odd." "Nothing odd about it." "It still seems odd to me." But Tom could be a difficult person to argue with, and even though he was sensitive to Katie's suspicions, he persisted in maintaining innocent, irregular contact with Sharon, and she with him. And when Katie grew more secure in the relationsahip, and had met Sharon a couple of times, she began to trust and accept this friendship and also discovered in Sharon a friend for herself. The two women had developed a closeness of their own, and although it was never something from which Tom was excluded, it was a distinct evolution of his former relations with Sharon. Since Katie's death Sharon had telephoned twice, and had written two letters, but Tom hadn't felt able to reciprocate. Now he felt ready to see her. She was one of the very few people he could contemplate speaking to. He dug out a Sunday-newspaper supplement with advertisements for bucket-shop air flights. He'd already ringed one with a pen. They operated a round-the-clock service, so he gave them a call. Five minutes later he'd booked a flight, paid for by credit card. The flight was leaving the following afternoon. His hands trembled slightly as he began to throw things into a bag. A photograph of Katie smiled approvingly from the mantelpiece. He turned it facedown. He didn't want her to watch him packing. Travel fever had him tossing and turning in his bed that night. Then at 3 A.M. he was awoken by the usual tapping on the door. He didn't answer it. He lay awake, listening, knowing that it would be repeated at regular intervals. He knew who it was. He had answered the door before, and there was never anyone there. He knew the hand would continue to knock on the door until exactly 4:15. Then it would go away. Tonight it seemed to him a little more urgent. But he wouldn't answer it. He knew who it was. >>> |
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