By Light Alone (33 page)

Wiczek nodded, smiling a knowing smile.

‘I think it has happened again. The first happiness was getting my daughter back, of course, and, yes, the drugs I was on did stabilize my happiness. But now I’m experiencing a new happiness.’

‘Really?’

‘I have fallen in love. I’m in love. I think it has destabilized my medication, because I feel full of a kind of . . . dread.’

Wiczek nodded again, more slowly. ‘Is that not part of being in love?’

But Marie wasn’t going to put up with any nonsense. ‘I’m not talking about butterflies-in-stomach. I’m talking about a kind of misery – depression, I mean. I want you to rewrite my prescription to take account of this new thing in my life.’

Wiczek wouldn’t meet her eye. This really was the last thing she had expected. ‘I am really not sure, Ms Lewinski, that it is best to smother your feelings with medication.’

Marie felt like she had been slapped. The words came to her almost exactly as if she had been struck in the face! ‘Smother my feelings!’ she gasped.

‘You are in a new relationship,’ the woman said. ‘You need to attend to what your feelings are telling you. How can you judge whether this is indeed love, if you squeeze out your natural reactions?’

Marie got to her feet. She stood a little unsteadily, wobbly-wibbly, wibbly-wobbly. It was like a blow to the solar plexus. ‘I trusted you,’ she said. And then: ‘If I understand you correctly, you are saying that I do not love this man. Without knowing anything about him, without even knowing his name, you have the nerve to tell me that this is not the man for me!’

Wiczek was also on her feet, with a gratifyingly horrified expression on her thin little face.

‘How dare you! You don’t know anything about it!’

‘Not at all, Ms Lewinski, I assure you, I was not . . .’

Her grovelling came too late, obviously; but it at least gave a kind of strength to Marie’s own anger. ‘Be quiet! Shut up! I trusted you, I came to you for help! If a person came to you with a broken leg, begging you for a painkiller, would you smugly instruct them to pay attention to the message of their nerves?’

There were tears in the stupid woman’s eyes now. ‘Please! Please!’

‘We’re through,’ said Marie. ‘I am happier than I have
ever
been, do you hear me? How
dare
you tell me I am not! You don’t know anything about me, you skinny little jobsucker. What can you possibly understand about a person like me?’ Her anger elevated her. ‘I’m only surprised I ever thought you had any expertise,’ she said.

The woman just stood there looking poor and drawn, her face ruddy, wet with tears. Marie left her like that, and went home. There was so much resentment in the world. There were so many people who could not bear the happiness of others. Pettiness and hate.

At home, Ezra and Leah were watching a book. Marie kissed them both on the tops of their heads, feeling the ferocity of pure love thrumming inside her.
Her
kids! Out on the balcony she drank a beaker of grass wine down in one great gulp, and poured herself another. A sunkite was sliding overhead like a huge autumnal leaf. Its shadow seemed wholly disconnected from it; a double diamond of grey sliding over Roosevelt and over the lagoon. The edge of its shade was doing that disconcerting quantum-leap thing: now adhering closely to the street, now jumping suddenly on the roof of the adjacent building.

Leah came out. ‘Ma,’ she said. ‘Carol wants to know if she should cook now?’

It took a moment to remember who Carol was. ‘And she can’t ask me herself?’

Leah shrugged, slouching half in at the door and half on the balcony. There was something particularly provoking about her posture. Ill-disciplined, loose-limbed. As if she weren’t taking things seriously enough. ‘Ma,’ she said again. ‘The charity you work for?’

‘
What,
Leah?’ she said, tipping the beaker to get the last drops of drink into her mouth. She sounded a little more peevish and annoyed than she intended. ‘What is it you want?’

But her tone had cowed the girl. Look at the restlessness of her long limbs! She slouched most of the way back into the apartment so that only her left leg remained on the balcony. The fact that Leah could so easily be browbeaten by her mother’s anger, paradoxically, only made Marie angrier. She made an effort to control herself.

‘You mean the Queens garden? You mean the rewilding project?’

Leah’s expression was incomprehensible to Marie.

‘That’s not a charity, my love,’ Marie said. ‘Come here.’

Leah obeyed, in her slackly fidgety way. She sat herself down next to her mother, and permitted herself to be embraced. ‘What do you want to know about it?’ Marie asked.

‘Not the garden,’ said Leah, in a low voice.

‘Not the garden?’

‘The Gunes-what-you-say.’

‘Oh!’ Marie said. ‘You mean the Gunesekera Organization?’

‘Yes.’

‘What about it?’

It took a moment for Leah to come out with it. ‘Could I do something for it?’

This was a very strange development. ‘Do something for it? What do you mean, do something? What do
you
think you could do for it?’

Leah shrugged again.

‘You do understand what it is, don’t you? It provides educational opportunities for the children of the very poor,’ Marie explained. ‘The absolutely poor, you know.’

‘You’re still involved in it, right?’

‘Well, yes.’ Marie. ‘Although most of my time is taken up with the garden, now, to be honest. But I’m still on the committee. Oh, my love, do you
really
think there’s much a twelve-year old could do for the Gunesekera people?’

‘Thirteen,’ said Leah, staring at her own feet. ‘Ma – are you going to marry Mr Arto?’

‘Yes,’ said Marie, surprising herself with how easily the word came out. ‘You see, he and I have fallen in love. We are going to get married, my dear. That’s what people do when they’re in love.’ Trying without complete success to put a wry and funny inflection on her words. She waited for Leah to follow up with a question about her father, but instead she said: ‘I’ll go tell Carol to cook, then,’ and wriggled free. Away she sloped, drawing her long limbs fluidly after her.

Marie watched the lagoon, and the sky, and the buildings. If she were any happier, she’d die. If she were any happier she’d expire. If she were any happier, if it were even possible to be happier, then she would break down in a blizzard of cold tears. Stand in the place where you live, is good advice.

7

Arto asked: ‘Are you planning on seeing your friend Rodion any time soon?’

‘What
is
it with you and Rodion?’

‘Oh you know,’ he said, smiling. ‘Spy stuff.’

‘That attempt to put a twinkle into your speech,’ she said, coldly, ‘is, I have to say, a
complete
misfire.’ She took hold of his hand. ‘You know, a more suspicious woman might get the impression that the only reason you spend time with me is to get close to that old man.’

‘Sweetheart!’ he laughed. ‘How could you think it? The spy in me is interested in Rodion, but the
man
in me is interested in you.’

‘And why,’ she said, only partially placated, ‘would a spy be interested in that dried-up old man? He must be a hundred and fifty.’

‘He has historical importance.’

‘History!’ sniffed Marie. ‘
No
such thing. An abstraction – by very definition it is past and over and dead and inexistent.’ Was that even a word?

‘Sometimes history pops up in the present,’ said Arto, ‘like a zombie.’

‘So Rodion’s a zombie?’

‘Might become one. But we’ll keep an eye on him, and make sure that doesn’t happen.’

One night, she had a nightmare. It took place in the Queens garden, and it was completed and it was a place of rare, Edenic beauty. She was there, and Arto, and George too – though, why him? – and Arsinée, who had been one of Leah’s carers years and
years
before (why think of
her
?), and a dozen or so other people. It was as if everybody had gathered for an opening ceremony, and she was expected to make a speech. But she couldn’t think what to say. So she looked around the crowd. Ezra was there; but she couldn’t see Leah. She looked about at a complex tapestry of greens and green-blues, olives and emeralds, with bright red and bright blue flowering blooms, the loveliness of neoEden. Then she looked into the sky, and she saw a great fleet of flying machines, filling the sky from horizon to horizon. And as she gazed upward she saw one break away from the formation and swoop down through the air. It didn’t look like a plane or a flitter; and it didn’t look like a military aircraft, although that was clearly its intent. It looked, rather, like a comet. An oval chassis with a bright light at the nose, and streaming away behind it a huge windsock tail of brightness. It came closer, and Marie could hear the rapid click-clack noise of its approach. At the very last moment, and with abrupt terrifying horror, Marie understood that it was coming down to destroy the whole of the Queens garden. She saw it was coming down, although nobody else seemed to. Everybody else was stupidly placid, and unconcerned. She tried to open her mouth to warn people, but her mouth muscles did not work. And then the whole area, everything, everywhere, was a great tangle of fire – explosions all around, lifted by her imagination directly from books: rosebud knots of flame unfolding and swelling; and spiky bursts of smoke and fire, red and white and black and a hideous tempest roar. The plants were all burning with the intense heat of—

Awake.

She was lying in her bed, and Arto was snoring beside her.

When she thought back to that dream, it seemed to her that it happened on the night before the garden was overrun. But this was her memory telescoping things. In fact, there was more than a week between this vivid dream, and the events in the garden. Still, there was some symbolic point to the compression of time; for together they marked the point at which everything in the world toppled over.

Leah. It was a conclusion that felt inevitable once she had reached it. It felt, in fact, as if she had made the decision a long time before, but had through some clumsy oversight not realized until this moment. To look into her eyes was to see George, and not see herself at all. Ezra was different. Ezra was not a stranger to her. She wondered if this was how men felt, looking into the faces of their offspring and registering the impossibility of knowing, for certain, their paternity. She felt like the first woman in history to have that sensation. There was nothing for it, Leah would have to go and live with her father. Leah would have to go to George, with Marie’s blessing – with her love. But she couldn’t stay in this place with this person.

Her new life was beginning.

She had a row with Arto. He was drunk, again, and kept saying in his most braying voice that marriage was vulgar, that love was vulgar, that love was for the fucking longhairs, that it was all
empty
air and
free
light and nothing real. ‘I can’t believe you want to
wound
me like this!’ Marie was yelling at him. ‘I’ve opened my heart to you! I can’t believe you want to lacerate me like this!’

‘You haven’t seen where it all ends up!’ he cried. He was crying! Oh Lord, look at that! Tears squirming on his face. All the wah-wah-wah. And now there was nothing but scorn for him in her rage.

‘Are you a
man
?’ she boomed at him. ‘Are you a little baby, crying for your Mamma or are you a man? God, you make me
despise
you. You’ve turned all my love for you into contempt.’

He was on the floor, sobbing, and his tears and slobber made a darker patch on the rug. ‘You haven’t seen where it all ends up!’ he kept repeating. ‘And I have! I’ve seen where it all ends up! Love? Love? You haven’t seen where it all ends up!’

‘There
is
a connection between us,’ she told him. Or perhaps she was telling herself.

‘If you could see where it all ends up,’ he was saying – or something like this, it was hard, it was hard to understand what his words were, they were slurred, ‘you wouldn’t talk about love and marriage if you could see.’

The wine pours from the bottle, the fluid moving out of the cylinder and through the glass pipe neck. The wine is a twisty rope. To the glass. It is toxins that give it that red hue. The wine is the red snake that leaps down from the bottle writhing in the sunlight to curl in the glass.