Caedmon’s Song (29 page)

February, bleak and cold, came and went. Kirsten spent much of the time in her room brooding on the dark places in her mind, trying to find ways to make the cloud yield up its secrets. This was
her main problem. Without Laura’s hypnotherapy, she couldn’t get at her censored memories. She bought a book on self-hypnosis and practised with some success. She could relax easily
enough and induce a light trance, but she couldn’t get beyond the fishy odour. Nonetheless, she intended to keep at it until she dispersed the cloud.

Towards the end of that month and until well into April, she found some solace in
The Cloud of Unknowing,
the fourteenth-century masterpiece of Christian mysticism, which she picked off
her shelf to help her set her mind on university studies again. Yet Kirsten very much doubted that she read it the way its author intended. The words seemed to address her own problem in a
startlingly direct way, and the irony wasn’t lost on her:

It was a kind of inversion of what Kirsten felt – certainly it wasn’t God she was seeking, nor did she love the object of her quest – but the words gave her sustenance,
nonetheless, and helped her through the darkness, both internal and external.

The book also helped describe what she was experiencing in a way that even Laura Henderson hadn’t been able to get at:

It was exactly like the dark bubble, or cloud, she felt in her mind. It came between her and the Devil, the man who had maimed her, and it wasn’t so much an object or an element as a
feeling, a sense of something impenetrable anchored deep in her mind.

The book offered more in the way of practical advice, too, and Kirsten began to wonder how she had ever sustained herself for so long without it. Especially the fifth meditation, which read:

Kirsten had to distance and detach herself from the everyday world if she wanted to follow through with her purpose. There was no use clinging to sentimental notions of good and evil. She had to
learn to exist in a detached, rarefied world where the object of her quest had supreme importance and everything and everyone else was lost, for as long as it took, in a cloud of forgetting. But
nobody must know this. She had to appear to be making progress as far as family and friends were concerned.

The book was arranged into seventy-five short numbered chapters, or meditations, and it was not the kind of text one could read for hours on end. Kirsten read a chapter a day, occasionally
skipping a day to read a novel, so she managed to stretch the book out for over two months, as winter turned into spring.

Soon, bluebells and forget-me-nots grew in the woods again, and dandelions and buttercups gilded the open fields. The bitter air warmed and released the scents of the countryside from its wintry
grip: grass and tree bark after rain; wild garlic rubbed between the fingers; damp earth recently ploughed over. As she walked and took it all in, Kirsten remembered last autumn, when she had felt
dead inside and nothing could touch her. Now that she had a purpose, a sense of mission, she could enjoy the world again.

The book continued to convince her of the holiness of her task and seemed to promise success. When, on the final page one fresh, bright morning in mid-May, she read that ‘it is not what
you are or have been that God looks at with his merciful eyes, but what you would be,’ she knew without doubt that she would succeed. ‘All holy desires grow by delays; and if they fade
because of these delays then they were never holy desires.’ Tenacity. Determination. They were the qualities she had to nurture in order to prove her desires holy. Her need would not fade; it
was with her, part of her, day and night.

Throughout this period, she still continued to visit Bath and see Laura, too, though not as frequently as before. Once a fortnight seemed enough for what they had to talk about. The main topic
towards the end was Kirsten’s feelings about being a ‘victim’.

Some schools, Laura explained, hold that there are people who are born victims, who somehow attract killers. When the circumstances are right, they will get what they were born for. Things
happen to us because of what we are, some psychologists maintain, and because of this, some of us keep making the same mistakes time after time – marrying the wrong man or woman, for example,
or seeking out situations in which we are abused, asking for trouble. It wasn’t masochism, Laura said, but something rooted deep in a person’s unconscious that led him or her to keep
making the same wrong choices.

Did Kirsten think she was one of those people? Did she feel guilt over what had happened to her? Did she feel as if she had asked for it?

The whole subject puzzled Kirsten at first. For a long time, she had simply assumed that it had been her bad luck to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, the unfortunate victim of a random
assault. It had never, in fact, occurred to her that she might have been asking for it. That was the rapist’s common defence, wasn’t it, that his victim had been asking for it because
she had dressed in a certain way or smiled at the wrong time? Kirsten couldn’t accept that.

If she had given in to Hugo’s advances that night and gone home with him, none of this would have happened. If she hadn’t had to get home reasonably early and sober to pack for the
next day, then she might have stayed at the party longer and walked across the park with a group of drunken friends. If she hadn’t walked across the park that night but had taken the well-lit
roads around it, if she hadn’t strayed from the path to sit on the lion like a silly girl . . . and so it went on, nothing but a lot of ifs. And on the plus side, if that man hadn’t
been walking his dog at precisely the right time, then Kirsten would have died like the later victims had.

But the more she talked about it with Laura, the more she realized that things could only have been different had she been a different kind of person. Those schools were right, in a way. The
roots of what happened were tangled up with who she was. She could easily have given in to Hugo, for example. He was attractive enough, and plenty of her friends would have done so; indeed, most of
them had, at one time or another. But no, she wasn’t ‘that kind’ of girl. And she did habitually cross the park alone after dark, no matter how often people expressed concern.
Also, it would never have occurred to her not to give in to that childish impulse to ride the lion unless she had been with company. In other words, maybe she did think of herself as a born victim
and she just hadn’t admitted it before. But she didn’t tell Laura this. She could sense that Laura was testing her, trying to find out how sensitive she was, so she gave what she
thought were the right answers. Laura seemed relieved.

But Kirsten continued to question herself. Why did she cross the park by herself in the dark, for example? Was she looking for something to happen? She certainly hadn’t been making any
kind of a feminist gesture. When women want to make a point about their right to walk the streets and parks in safety, they do so in large, well-publicized groups – the sensible way. But
Kirsten often did it alone. Why? Was she inviting destruction?

Somehow, a simple chain of causality wasn’t enough to explain what had happened to her. She had been living in a dream ever since the attack had occurred simply because she had accepted it
in such a shallow way and had never really contemplated the deeper implications. That was no acceptance at all.
The Cloud of Unknowing,
her last talks with Laura Henderson: both of these
gave a shape and depth to her quest that she had never imagined possible before; they concentrated her resolve and acted like a magnet forming a rose-pattern from iron filings.

It all meant something – everything happened for a reason – and the more she thought about it, if there was a part of her deep inside that made her the victim – just as hatred
twisted deep inside the man made him a killer – then the person who had found her must have been destined to be her saviour. He had found her for a purpose, she now realized. She hadn’t
died like the others; she had been delivered from that. And this was when the compelling idea of fate, destiny and retribution started to occur to her. If she had been a victim not by blind chance
but for a reason, then she was still alive for a reason. She bore her stigmata for a reason. She carried within her the means of destroying this evil force. In a sense, she was his nemesis. And
that was destiny, too.

She never told Laura all this; like the true nature of the cloud or bubble in her mind, it would have been too difficult to put into words. Besides, she wasn’t at all clear about it
herself at first. It didn’t evolve as a fully fledged theory, like a Pallas Athene sprung from the head of Zeus, but the ideas took shape over time. It was something that she thought about a
lot in the spring months of May and June while she re-read old novels, ploughed through Julian of Norwich’s
Revelations of Divine Love,
and considered which university to apply to and
which area of study to concentrate on. It would probably be best, she decided, to apply to several places – say the north, where Sarah suggested they share a flat together, and to Bath and
Bristol, where her parents wanted her to go. Then, when the time came, she could see how she felt and make her choice.

In early June, the killer, the man the press were now calling the ‘Student Slasher’, claimed yet another victim: Kim Waterford, a petite brunette with a twinkle in her eyes that even
the poor-quality newspaper photograph couldn’t dim. Well, he had dimmed it, hadn’t he? Now her eyes would be dull and lifeless as dead fish. Kirsten pasted the picture and articles in
her scrapbook and worked even harder at self-hypnosis.

One glorious day in late June when Bath was filled with tourists again and boaters splashed and laughed on the Avon outside the half-open window, Laura smiled at the end of the session, offered
Kirsten a cigarette and said, ‘I think we’ve gone as far as we can go together. If you need me, I’ll be here. Don’t hesitate to call. But, really, I think you’re on
your own now.’

Kirsten nodded. She knew she was.

SUSAN

Still clutching her holdall in the carrier bag, Sue returned to the shops again that afternoon and spent a few pounds of her fast-dwindling funds on some dark grey Marks &
Spencer slacks and a blue windcheater with a zip-up front. She spent a good while in front of the toilet mirror on her make-up, changing the emphasis a little here and there, and found that it was
possible to fasten her wig back in a ponytail without revealing any of her own hair. Her glasses also went well with the new outfit. Now she looked just different enough not to spark any memories
among those who might have noticed her ghost-like presence. She was no longer just the plain, primly dressed, ‘nice girl’ in the raincoat; nor was she the short-haired tomboy in jeans
and a checked shirt. She looked more like a family holidaymaker taking a break from her parents’ company for a while. The new clothes would also be more suitable for hanging around in the
woods watching over the factory, if it came to that.

She was annoyed about the holdall. When she had got to Saltwick Nab, she found that the tide was coming in, not going out. She would have to go back later in the evening, or perhaps it would be
easier to throw it from the top of West Cliff or somewhere closer. There would be too many people around in that area, though. Someone might see her. She shoved the raincoat and hood along with
everything else in the holdall and took it back to her room. At least it was coming in useful now she had more stuff to get rid of.

She thought about Keith a lot too. Lying in that hospital in Scarborough with tubes and needles stuck in him, just as she had lain over a year ago. She had dismissed the idea of trying to get to
him – security would be too tight, and she wasn’t sure she could go through with it in cold blood – but she couldn’t stop worrying. The police might be looking for her at
that very moment. All the more reason to hurry up.

At a quarter to five, she dropped in at Rose’s Cafe. The stringy blonde behind the counter showed no interest in her beyond taking her money. Sue needed some idea of what her man’s
hours were. When could she expect to find him walking alone in the dark? When did he make his deliveries? When did he sleep? She assumed that he had either made a morning delivery that day, or had
set off the night before and stayed over. If the latter, then the odds were that he would be at home tonight. It annoyed her that she couldn’t find out for sure. She certainly couldn’t
ask anyone. No doubt the drivers worked very irregular hours, taking loads when they were ready and standing in for mates who were ill or had driven too many hours. All she could really do was
watch a little longer, and she didn’t know how much time she had left.