Significance (45 page)

Perhaps at one time she had thought she could make a difference, but her efforts to smile at him, to talk sweetly, to evince signs of anything like affection in Aaron had no effect whatsoever. She had wanted to win his love, to effect a miraculous cure – she'd crooned and gushed at Aaron whenever she and Scott went to visit his family. Had it been arrogance on her part – the idea that she could change him? Or was it done to mask the fear and discomfort he evinced in her? One was as bad as the other in its way. Now, like Scott, she was limited and functional in her communication with Aaron. As now, ignoring him, cold.

Scott had been gone for three hours. Marilyn, trying to distract herself from the worry, had been going through her recent work adding a comma here, a line break there. Then she went back through it and crossed them out again.

Repetition. Maybe she was no better than Aaron, only marking time with this ritualistic process of making symbols in ink on paper. Measuring out her life in coffee spoons as T. S. Eliot had done. She had always hated the banality of that metaphor or rather, had done when she was younger; now she was beginning to see the sad truth of it. Poetry did not transform her existence any more than her smiles changed Aaron's.

She looked up suddenly, sensing a change in the room, an absence. Aaron was still there, in the same place as before, but he had stopped moving. She watched him, uncertain what to do. He might grow agitated again, or he might at last be tired.

She could see the edge of his face, the same sculpted cheekbones and jaw line as Scott's, and the same blue eyes. He was blinking slowly and repeatedly.

‘Time for bed, Aaron. Do you want some warm milk?'

He blinked rapidly for a few moments as if absorbing this information, then turned away from the wall and began to trudge wearily in the direction of the stairs.

Marilyn followed a few paces behind, saying a few words of encouragement and silently praying that he wouldn't want to use the toilet or insist on putting on his pyjamas. The pyjamas were still packed in the big suitcase in the trunk of the rental car.

But as usual, Aaron had no interest in undressing or brushing his teeth and merely slouched on through to his room where, without even lifting the covers, he lay down on the bed and closed his eyes.

‘Night
-
night, Aaron,' she said, then crossed the room and drew the curtains against the late afternoon light. She left the room and on closing the door behind her, she found her eyes drawn to the key in the lock on the outside. She considered turning it, trapping him inside so that she could at least relax without worrying that he might somehow escape again. But no, that would be wrong, something could happen, a fire perhaps. And anyway, Scott had to be back soon. Or he would ring and let her know what was happening.

She went back to the kitchen; the fridge was still packed with the food they'd bought in anticipation of a longer stay, she picked up two eggs and held them in the palm of one hand sensing the slightly gritty, slightly smooth coolness of them. They weren't date stamped and so Marilyn (who had always been cautious about gone
-
off food and pesticides and listeria and salmonella, and was even more so now she was pregnant) filled a clear Pyrex dish with cold water and gently put the eggs in. Both sank to the bottom, but one lifted its nose slightly upwards as if eager to take a look around. Marilyn removed this one, put it in the bin and fetched a replacement which she added to the water. It lay at the bottom like its twin, incurious and rather tame.

Marilyn poured the water away then broke both eggs into the bowl and after adding a little milk and water she beat them with a fork.

The omelette she made was so thoroughly cooked it was rubbery and disappointing. She pushed it around her plate, eating it all finally only from a sense of duty to her unborn child.

She tried not to think about Scott, because whenever she did her imagination elaborated wildly on the limited information and extemporised, beating out antic threats and distortions; Scott was gay, Scott had been kidnapped, Scott was not gay, but he'd secretly had her life insured and now someone was going to break in and kill her, then make it seem like an accident. It was insane how her thoughts could race away.

It was better to try to continue as normal, to go through her notebooks, to eat a very late lunch, to make sure Aaron was okay, to perhaps watch a little TV or read. But she found her mind would not settle and so she sat at the kitchen table and read for the hundredth time.

My mother said, and said again,

that almost dead, my father, oh Polonius

saved me from the stagnant pool.

She crossed out the ‘oh Polonius' as it struck her as too pretentious. It cast her as a precocious Ophelia. Stupid.

Then very quickly from that brief moment of focus and lucidity, she found herself gazing dully out of the window, her sense of purpose entirely gone. For a few seconds (thirty seconds at most) she did not know who she was or where she was. She had experienced this before once or twice and mentioned it to Scott who gave the phenomenon a name; a fugue state or dissociation of the personality. But Scott had gone on to laugh about it when Marilyn had asked somewhat nervously what she should do about it, whether she should see a psychiatrist.

‘Just stress,' he'd said. ‘It's nothing. You're normal.' And Marilyn had almost been disappointed.

She looked down at her poem again, drew a wriggly line under ‘oh Polonius' and scribbled ‘stet' in the margin to indicate that the words should stay. Then she recapped her pen and went to the sink and washed her hands under the cold tap, dried them on a paper towel, went into the living room and turned on the TV. For a time she stood a few feet from it, firing the remote control at the screen as one channel rapidly changed to another. She did this until she had exhausted them all and was back on the first one which showed an Indian elephant being dressed and decorated in preparation for a religious festival; its dusty, wrinkled skin transformed by bright powdery colours and elaborately embroidered headgear.

If it weren't for Aaron, she and Scott might have gone to India, to Vietnam, to Thailand. In previous years at least, but not this year, not in her condition. She turned the TV off again and looked out of the window at the hotel opposite. Her gaze wandered to the right, where, its front fender nosing into view, she spied the hire car. For a moment it seemed that the car itself was the cause of all their present worries.

The sun had moved over the house and now the front garden and half of the road beyond it lay in shadow. The windows of the hotel glowed with a rosy hue as if lit from within. It was getting late, and Scott had been gone for far too long.

She lifted the telephone receiver in order to check for the ring tone. Then she went to the front door and tried opening it. It was locked and the key was in its usual hiding place.

Is this how Aaron feels, she wondered; is he perpetually locked in a state of not knowing what was going on, restless, stripped of any powers of concentration, with nothing but a blur of meaningless pictures and noises, of tasteless food and sudden sensory pains or pleasures – the washing of hands, the scrubbing of teeth? She would rather be dead, she thought, then just as quickly, something reasserted it in herself and a small voice (God's?) firmly said ‘no – not true'. She hurried back to the notebook on the kitchen table, sat down and uncapped the pen.

‘Free will,' she wrote on a new clean page, ‘free will is water, its many forms defining nothing. To drink is drowning…' Then she stopped writing. A new thought had occurred to her. She could ring the police. Enquire as to where Scott was, what was happening. She had a right to know and there could be no crime in asking.

Verso

Scott had sat in the soulless interview room with the seemingly soulless young policeman for a long time. Someone had knocked the door three quarters of an hour ago and delivered an unasked for can of warm coke and a white plastic cup. Scott did not see who brought it and no words were exchanged.

The young policeman had cracked open the tab and poured a quantity of the bubbling hissing liquid into the cup. He placed the cup on the table for Scott, but put the can out of reach. Was he trained to do that, Scott wondered? Were suspects, even suspects in such trivial offenses, not to be trusted with soft drink tins? What could he do with it, rip it apart with his bare hands, then use the sharp ragged edge to cut the younger man's throat? Or his own throat perhaps?

You never really fully appreciate the Kafkaesque nature of the law's processes until you're on the other side of them, Scott mused. There was a certain comfort to be had in intellectualising his current situation. He could sit outside himself, pondering his experience. Not that this case was serious, it was merely a misunderstanding, therefore (notwithstanding the cost of the missed flight and his vague worries about Marilyn coping with Aaron alone and then the inevitable fretfulness of his parents when they learned of the mess he had, one way or another, created) he should relax, pay the sort of attention to his fears, to the windowless room and the absurdity of it all, in the same way that he was sure that Marilyn or one of her writer friends would. One of them, now he thought about it, Marc Kincaid, actually worked with prisoners, teaching them creative writing. Scott remembered scoffing at Marilyn's gushing awe when she talked about the project Marc was involved in at the prison. She had also, in a misguided attempted to sway Scott, shown him a chapbook of poems written by several of the prisoners and while she (as patiently as ever) tried to explain what was so good about one of the poems in particular and why the use of this word followed by that word created some resonance that he couldn't for the life of him see, he had cruelly interrupted her to point out that these men's victims would be thrilled to think that everything that had happened to them had caused (in the end) the production of these delicate little poesies. ‘I'm sure it was well worth getting raped or robbed or murdered for,' he remembered saying with a sarcastic grin, until he noticed how wounded she looked, and then he regretted it.

‘But Scott…' she had replied, then her voice trailed off and she sunk into gloom. She'd closed the chapbook and put it back in her bag. His words had made her remember something and he guessed what, though he didn't say as much. Sometime before, when they had first started seeing one another, there was that inevitable stream of stories about their past lives and experiences, an exchange of truths and confessions. Sometimes these disclosures were about other people and the point was that these narratives illuminated some aspect of the teller's personality and how it had affected them. Thus Marilyn told him a dark tale about a girl she had roomed with during college. Marilyn had never really warmed to the young woman as she'd seemed standoffish and almost religiously studious. There were three other girls in the house besides Marilyn and this bookish young woman, and somehow, though she still couldn't quite fathom why, four of them instantly bonded and began to do everything together, while the other remained outside the group.

‘We must have tried to involve her at the start,' Marilyn said, ‘but then we just assumed, for whatever reasons, that she didn't want to join in. Then…'

And here, Scott remembered, Marilyn had paused, obviously searching for how to go on with her story.

‘…then one night the girl went out on a blind date. It was some man she'd met through a lonely hearts column in the local newspaper. The four of us came home a bit high, loud, laughing, full of whatever fun we'd been having and I went to the bathroom. The lights were off in there. Indeed there'd been no lights on in any part of the house so naturally we assumed the other girl was still out. I flicked the switch without thinking about it, and straightaway, I saw her there in the tub. The bathroom was all white you know, white tiles, white tub and the light was one of those industrial strength fluorescent ones, clinical almost. And there was Sharon…'

Yes, Scott thought, that was her name, Sharon.

‘She was lying on her side. She was a very small girl, very thin and she was curled up in this tight little ball in the bath. Naked. Not a stitch on. Her back was to me and I remember noticing the bones showing white and lumpy along her spine, the wing
-
like quality of her shoulder blades. The tub was only half full of water and she was shivering. Just kind of trembling and quivering all over. And the skin of her shoulder and her back was very pale and white. Everything was white except that there were smears of blood on the rim of the bath and the water was pink. I screamed. At first I thought she'd done something to herself, you know cut her wrists or something. I couldn't see her face. She turned around when I screamed with a sudden scared jerk of her head. And then I saw that her face was distorted and bruised; her mouth was swollen and cut, one eye barely open.'

‘The rest of the girls came running in as soon as they heard me scream and Sharon covered her face with both hands as if she were ashamed and couldn't bear us to see her. We helped her out of the tub and she kept her hands over her face even though she was completely naked. She was bruised all over, cut too, and she was bleeding from between her legs. Heavily, like she was haemorrhaging. She'd been raped. Raped and beaten up. By this guy. This fucking lonely heart!'

It must have been one of the only times that Scott had ever heard Marilyn curse, though it was no wonder.