The Worlds Within Her (48 page)

But no answers come to her, and even the scene shapes itself in her head as something out of a gangster movie: fancy hats and double-breasted suits, submachine guns spitting fire.

Cyril opens his door and puts out a foot.

Yasmin thinks: No, God, no …

But she follows, muscles taut with unwillingness, as he pushes his way through the grassy field.

Cyril's eyeball swerves off-centre. He says, “This is where they found him.”

Hidden among the grass, camouflaged by moss as thick as knitted wool, is a small plinth. He pushes the grass away, stamping on the blades so that they will not spring back.

“We put this up a year later, a kind of commemoration. Some people had an idea for some kind o' park but, as you can see, it din't get very far.” He scratches some of the moss away, revealing a patch of wet and darkened stone. “Is only concrete. We were going to add a brass plaque later, with his name and dates, nuh, but somehow we never get around to it. Life goes on, people get busy.”

And a life, Yasmin thinks, is reduced to a lost relic. She touches the plinth. The concrete, cold and damp, turning friable, leaves a sandy residue on her fingertips. She thinks of the boulders beside the sea, of the water steadily reducing them to rubble, of the blind man and his pebbles that left no ripples — and her throat constricts with a sudden surge of emotion that rises from her stomach and erupts, bitter, in her mouth.

Cyril stands back from the plinth. He slides his hands into his pant's pockets and after a moment says, “Oh, well.” He asks if she wants some time alone, and when she shakes her head he gestures towards the car. “Shall we, then?”

She leads the way back, in a hurry to leave this place.

In a hurry now to care for her mother.

ON THE WAY
back Yasmin stops seeing. She has a sense of time stopped on an urgency, her mind occupied by the plinth, and by the box that sits in her room at the house.

A bit farther on, Cyril turns sharply right, following another road into the mountains, and she knows that they are taking another route back, completing the journey by completing a circle.

The vegetation thickens and arches; darkness falls. The headlights of the car hug the grey asphalt ahead. In the mirror outside her window Yasmin sees a black tunnel, its centre a circle of pale light retreating steadily.

Cyril says, “You think you might come back one day? For a visit, I mean. Maybe with your husband?”

“I can't think that far ahead.”

“But you must. This trip — is not really a visit, if you know what I mean. You must come back. After all, you're one of us.”

His words send a chill through Yasmin. This world — the world of her mother and father — is undeniably part of her. But his words force her to acknowledge a greater truth.

“I don't even know,” she says, “what it means to be one of you.”

“Is —” He sighs, and in the darkness she sees that he is exhausted. “Is to share flesh and blood. And to understand things without all the words. Is to know that you're home.”

“Cyril …” She is grateful he does not see the shake of her head, for she would rather not tell him that by most of his definition, she is not one of them.

They emerge high up into a soft evening light, the world opening up: the sea and sky a rich, dark blue, the sun an orange glow behind the far arm of the mountains. Just above the horizon, as if waiting in the wings, a crust of icy moon hangs in fragile suspension.

Yasmin feels a sweet unravelling within herself, as if her ribs are unlocking themselves one by one.

The road, here wide and well paved, begins a steady descent down the mountainside. As it curves and bends, they drive through a flickering transience of darkness and light. On the plain below, the town emits a dull glow that will harden and brighten as the greater darkness takes hold.

Yasmin feels a stirring of gratitude towards Cyril. This drive, offered as improvisation but clearly calculated, has not had the effect she suspects he intended. He has opened her eyes to the limits of the worlds within her.

The road curves into darkness, headlights flickering on the, cut mountain wall on one side and, on the other, drawing the low metal barrier that marks the edge of the cliff.

Suddenly the car wobbles violently, tires rumbling on the narrow verge between pavement and mountain wall — the wall no longer parallel, dead ahead now, filling the vision in a rush.

Cyril says, “Shit!” and wrenches at the wheel.

Tires squeal.

Orange. Blue. The cold, cold moon.

The metal barrier, hard and narrow, a band of silver approaching rapidly.

Yasmin's mind races with thoughts of flight, of falling through soundless air.

Cyril wrenches at the wheel again and the car tilts crazily, the headlights marking its path away from the barrier, back onto the roadway. With a jolt and a hiccup, they come to a stop.

Thoughts of Jim flood Yasmin's mind as her lungs — inert, collapsed — balloon with air. Her hands cover her face, palms hot with her gasping breath.

Cyril says, “Well.” He touches her forearm. “You all right?”

She nods.

“Sorry 'bout that. I don't know what —” And suddenly his voice breaks. He sniffles, and with an emotion that startles her he says, “You know, I mean well, Yasmin. I'm not a bad man.”

His words puzzle and move her. “Of course you're not,” she says.

He sighs, sniffles again. Then, putting the car into gear, he says, “Hellofanepitaph, eh?”

The last of the light blends earth and sky with the colour of mercury.

The road takes them through a silvered world.

Past the town, buildings smothered in pewter.

Past the port, anchored tugs and fishing boats like monuments in stainless steel.

Past trees and parks plated in chrome.

It is, Yasmin thinks, like a world perfectly, beautifully preserved. And in the seconds that the light persists, she imagines it a world metalled into time.

JIM SAID, “THERE'S
no such thing as coincidence, Yas. Accidents don't just happen. They have a logic to them — a logic too cosmic for us to grasp.”

Yasmin heard in his voice the sound of a man trying to convince himself. It was not a game she could play: her struggle was to accept senselessness.

“The problem, Jim,” she said, “is that I find no comfort in that. None at all.”

The effort of speech, more difficult with each word, lent a formality to her sentences. She sounded, she thought, like an actress on stage; sounded like her mother. The words were not filling her void; they were instead falling into it.

Jim rolled his chair backwards, stood up slowly. He paused, a silhouette against the window, as if listening for sounds in the night.

“Neither do I,” he whispered.

He made his way around the desk, features emerging from shadow. He placed himself behind her, laid his hands on her shoulders.

She knew that he had heard the echo of the falling words. Knew that the trick for them would be to catch the words as they fell.

SHE EATS LITTLE
at dinner and the conversation, such as it is, is desultory.

Cyril speaks of the day, but Penny is not receptive.

Ash is absent, and no explanation is offered. But Yasmin notices that Penny glances occasionally at his empty chair with a look that is an indecipherable blend of helplessness, anger and wistfulness.

Amie, serving, moves with the litheness of a phantom, her feet gliding across the floor as if cushioned by a membrane of air.

It is as if she has woven the filaments of her life into a cloak around herself, Yasmin thinks.

As if a life of servitude has brought to her layers of silence that resemble insubstantiality.

As if hers has become a life distanced to speculation:
as
always followed by
if
…

Does she, Yasmin wonders, hear her own echoes? Does she hear her own heart?

PHOTO: ONLY HER EYES ARE TURNED TOWARDS THE CAMERA, THE PUPILS DISTENDED AND UNFOCUSED, THE LIPS PURSED THIN AS IF APPREHENDED AT A MOMENT OF INDECISION. SHE HAS BEEN CAUGHT UNAWARES, IS UNHAPPY ABOUT IT. SOMETHING IN HER — THE NEATNESS WITH WHICH HER HAIR IS PULLED BACK PERHAPS, OR THE CARE WITH WHICH HER EYEBROWS HAVE BEEN PLUCKED AND GREASE-PENCILLED IN TELLS OF A WOMAN WHO LEAVES AS LITTLE AS POSSIBLE TO CHANCE, WHICH ITSELF HINTS AT A FEAR OF CHANCE AND THE UNKNOWN IT ENTAILS. THE SET OF HER JAW SUGGESTS THAT IN THE SECONDS FOLLOWING THE FLASH — THE LIGHT GLARING OFF HER SKIN, CHAFING AWAY WHATEVER TAN SHE MIGHT HAVE ACQUIRED — SHE UTTERS A PROTEST.

“Actually,” Cyril says, “she gave me the finger. In the nices' possible way of course.”

Penny laughs. “I don't remember Celia ever sayin' a bad word. Not once.” The cruel clarity of the fluorescent lighting gives an odd cast to her features — they appear thickened, less refined — so that her words, of fondness, of gentle praise, seem unmatched to her expression. “Of course, back then, we din't. We use to say things like
shite
and
shoot
and
jeezuwebs.”

“But Celia — Celia use to use sign language.”

Penny grows sombre. “That was Celia, all right. Signs. Givin' them and lookin' for them.”

Yasmin glances again at the photograph: at its preserved hysteria. “Did she enjoy living here?” Yasmin asks.

“It was her home,” Cyril replies. “We were her family.”

Penny says, “She wanted to be one of us.”

Cyril says, “She
was
one of us.”

Yasmin sees Penny's lips part, then close; sees her body rock backwards ever so slightly.
She was one of us.
She knows that her question has not been answered; knows that there is no answer. The silence quickly fills with the shrill of the insect chorus from the darkness outside.

Cyril's eyes glitter. He turns away, shuts them. Yasmin sees his Adam's apple twitching through the stiffened muscles of his throat.