Significance

Title Page
Dedication
Part One NIGHT
Runaway
France
Domestic Interior with Three Figures
Creatures of Habit
The House with the Yellow Shutters
L'écriture Feminine
Miroir Noir
The Golden Boy
The Golden Girl
Underwater
Innocence
Changes
The Running Man
Liberty, Fraternity, Equality
Finders Keepers
Storytelling
Like Alice
Part Two MORNING
Song to the Siren
The Scholar
Star Gazer
Lexicon
Dreamer
Fallen Angel
A Thousand Cuts
Duty
Lost Property
Lucy Locket Lost her Pocket
Gratitude
Mise en Scène
La Petite Mort
Labyrinths
Blood Ties
The Interpretation of Dreams
Love Hurts
Long Memories
Fishers of Men
Education
Bloodlines
Nature Morte
Written on the Body
Sancta Camisia
Part Three AFTERNOON
A-tisket, a-tasket
Evidence
Punishment
Written in the Contract
La Barbe-Bleue
Revenant
Bodies
Reasons to be Cheerful
The Hanged Man
Road Rage
Pleasures Taken
Consent
Control
Hunger
Voyeur
Sur la Table
Mirrors
He Hears a Different Drummer
A Man of Constant Sorrows
Close Quarters
The Quickening
Part Four TWILIGHT
Out of the Corner of your Eye
Killing me Softly
Verso
Second Thoughts
The Damage Done
The Huntress
The Lamb
On the Road to Calvary
Field of Play
A Jealous Ghost
Into the Shadows
Pastoral
Part Five AFTER
The Angel's Share
The Love Parade
To See a Whale
Hotel Rooms
The World, as Learned from Pictures
A Flower Closing
Prayers
House of Cards
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Copyright
About Seren

SIGNIFICANCE

by

Jo Mazelis

For Mark with love

Par
t One

NIGHT

What draws the reader to the novel is the hope of warming his shivering life with a death he reads about.

Walter Benjamin

Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance that he himself has spun.

Clifford Geertz

Runaway

Summer 2007

Then she is driving. The road a sleek raven's wing beneath her wheels. Driving faster than ever before, and marvelling, as she presses her foot on the accelerator, at the reasons for her previous caution. Yes, it is night and it's raining heavily, but there is nothing to be afraid of. Nothing in the world.

She is watching the road, her senses sharply attuned to any danger. She pulls into the fast lane to pass an articulated lorry. Guides the car back into the middle lane. Easy. A warning sign inside a red triangle. The vaulting deer. Lucy senses fear in the black painted silhouette. Imagines the sudden clatter of hooves on tarmac. And the jarring screams of the brakes. The dull impact of a car's fender catching the animal's flank.

She shakes her head as if disagreeing with an invisible interrogator. Imagine it all away. The motorways and dual carriageways, the airline coaches, the horse transporters, the Freelanders and Discoveries, the Picasso; the van parked in a field overlooking the road with an advert for laptops on its side.

Lucy wants all of it gone. But instead there is rain, and more rain, pushed to one side of the windscreen by the wipers, then pushed back again by the wind. Rivulets of clear water.

A man in a black Citroen catches her eye and passes her on the inside lane. His expression is leering, greedy, smug. She thinks of accelerating and swerving suddenly so that her car clips his. Her hands tighten on the wheel with intent – at these speeds, with this traffic and the punishing, relentless rain, everything could be altered in an instant.

But no, not now, not that. She is escaping: a runaway again. Just like she was when she was twelve, then fifteen. Not to forget the time she did it when she was eighteen. Now she is far too old to be called a runaway and smiles to herself at the thought. She relaxes her fingers on the wheel, sees in the rear window of the black Citroen a yellow sign announcing there is a baby on board. She slows.

The wind drops suddenly and the deluge eases, then stops. The night she is driving into is suddenly as dry as an old bone. And just as if the storm had been a source of energy for her, now it's abated she's suddenly tired. When she sees a sign for KATHS' KARAVAN KAFE! TEAS, COFFEES, BURGERS, CHIPS she pulls into a lay
-
by. But the catering van is shut up for the night and there is only one other car: a battered white Mercedes that takes off the moment Lucy draws up. She stays behind the wheel, lets her hands fall limply into her lap, breathes deeply and closes her eyes.

She is not ill like they say she is; she is fine. More than fine. Has never felt better.

Dover. The sea is what you notice as the car crests a hill. The rain has stopped and the day has a rinsed feeling to it – a good day to begin things.

Dover. White cliffs. No bluebirds. Blue sky. Gulls soaring. The air is still and fresh; on deck Lucy gazes at the sea. It's a busy shipping channel, vessel after vessel ploughing the grey
-
blue glittering water.

Staring down, feeling the throb of the ferry's engine, its surging pulse, Lucy finds herself remembering another ferry crossing years ago. She'd been on the way back from a school trip to Europe. It had been night and she, with a few friends, had been standing on deck watching the molten sea under the blanket of night. One of them, Dougie, a sweet boy who was neither remarkably good
-
looking nor clever, had bought a Panama hat in Italy that he'd worn every moment of the holiday. They'd all been laughing and joking, when Dougie suddenly asked her if he should throw his hat into the sea. She barely stopped to think about it, but it had seemed right at the time, the gesture of letting go, not only of the holiday, but also of those different selves each of them had been in that unfamiliar place.

So she'd said yes. Yes. The word itself sibilant, dancing from her lips with a smile. Perhaps he had needed permission, the encouragement of a handful of laughing girls.

They all watched as he threw it over the rail like a Frisbee. It flew up, pale against the night sky. Then fell on the churning waves where it briefly swirled and danced before it was swept away into darkness.

‘My hat!' he said surprised. Then, more sadly, he repeated the words. ‘My hat. Why did I do that?'

She could not answer. She had not expected regret.

She pushed aside the memory.
That
Lucy was so far away it almost hurt to remember her. And there had been, or so it seemed, other Lucys too, all of them fatally flawed, all of them vulnerable to defeat and pain and humiliation. Or capable, as with Dougie and his hat, of hurting others. Better to be alone. To remake oneself.

France

At La Coquille Bleue, Lucy orders
Pastis
, milky and aniseed flavoured. Then steak, which comes with
pommes frites
. In the corner, tied with a long hefty rope, there's a young dog, wolfish, with guarded blue eyes. After she has eaten, Madame Gallo, the hotel's owner, allows her to smoke at the table despite the signs prohibiting it. There are framed portraits of Joan of Arc everywhere. The girl soldier the English burnt at the stake. Now they would give Joan anti
-
psychotic drugs; Clozaril, Zyprexa, Seroquel. In the 1950s her shorn hair and cross
-
dressing would have earned her electroconvulsive therapy; the voice of God would grow mute, scorched out of existence by science. Madame Gallo smiles conspiratorially at Lucy as she sits there smoking.

Lucy orders a bottle of
vin rouge
. Madame Gallo watches her from behind the bar, she is middle
-
aged, but her face is still pretty, her hair dark and glossy. She dresses well. Looks exactly right for the part. As does Lucy, who is a runaway in the disguise of a confident young woman with money and credit cards and expensive new clothes.

It is dark when she leaves the hotel. A boy is standing on the edge of the pavement across the road. Lucy has the curious sensation that she passed him earlier – hours earlier, when it was still light, although the shadows had been lengthening. He is standing very still, the tips of his shoes over the paving slab's lip as if he were balanced on a high diving board. As she draws closer she sees that he is not as young as she had first thought. His frame is slight, his complexion pale and his posture is awkward, like that of a teenager who has grown too tall too fast. As she draws closer she expects him to look at her. But this boy
-
man, poised and seemingly ready to dive into the stream of traffic, does not show the merest sign of attention even though she is passing almost within reach.

His eyes, she sees, are very pale blue. So pale and unfocussed she wonders if he is sightless. That might explain everything.

Yes, she thinks, the boy is blind and perhaps a little strange too.

The next night she goes back to La Coquille Bleue but only remembers the strange young man as she nears the place where he was standing. He is not there. Of course, he is not there.

Lucy enters the restaurant and is given a table in the glassed
-
in area at the front. From here she cannot see the dog with its mournfully sad, sea
-
blue eyes.

None of the staff seem to remember her from the previous night and there is a large family group from the Netherlands at a nearby table who talk loudly amongst themselves. They laugh and pass maps and guidebooks between them, debating the next item on their itinerary. For the first time since she left England Lucy feels lonely.

She orders
Moules Marinière
but eats without pleasure. She has a single glass of white wine and even that seems devoid of taste, though she drinks it all the same. She asks for the bill, leaves a ten
-
euro note on the table and goes out into the fading twilight.

And there he is again. The boy
-
man. This time on a different part of the pavement. He rests one hand on the pole of a road sign. His feet are once again over the lip of the kerb. She walks towards him. He does not look at her; his gaze is fixed in some mid
-
air spot that hovers above the road.

Swifts dart about at rooftop level making high
-
pitched squeaks. Little arrows with white bellies that flash by. Little arrows that might pierce her heart, if her heart were not made of stone.

When she is two, perhaps three yards away, she stops walking and stands still, watching him.

He does not see her, nor even sense her presence so close by. He is not only blind, but also lacks the radar that most people possess. The sun is behind her, low in the sky and her shadow falls against his legs, his waist. He should sense the coolness of that shadow, but he does not move, just stares.