The Dead Lie Down (16 page)

I haven’t got the energy to pretend it was a coincidence that she turned up. Let him think what he wants.

‘She’s not your friend, Ruth. She might mean something to you, but you’re nothing to her.’

‘Where’s the picture?
Abberton
—what have you done with it? Tell me what’s going on.’

‘Do you believe what Waterhouse said? That my memory’s inventing things that haven’t happened?’ He starts to come towards me. ‘If it hasn’t happened, it’s not a memory. Do you think it’s possible to see the future?’

‘No. What do you mean?’

‘A clear image—like a photo, or a film—of something that hasn’t happened yet but is going to happen.’

‘No! Stop it! You’re scaring me.’

‘Me strangling that bitch Trelease—putting my hands round her throat and squeezing . . .’

‘Don’t.’ I back away from him. He looks determined and, at the same time, terribly afraid.
Like a man walking into a fire.

‘They say she’s alive. You say she’s alive. Maybe you’re all right. If you’re right, then what I’m seeing in my head can’t be the past. What if I haven’t killed her, but I’m going to?’

‘Aidan, don’t do this,’ I beg, putting my arms round him. He’s rigid, like stone. ‘What you’re saying’s not possible.’

‘
Abberton
,’ he mutters. ‘It’s part of a series. She hasn’t done them all yet—maybe only that one, the first. But she’ll do more. I can tell you how many there are going to be: nine. I can tell you what their names will be.’ He pushes me out of the way, pulls the lid off a blue marker pen and starts to write on the side of a cardboard poster tube. He reads aloud as he writes, like someone in a trance. ‘Abberton, Blandford, Darville, Elstow, Goundry, Heathcote, Margerison, Rodwell, Winduss.’

I stare at him, wondering who he is, who he’s turning into.
He’s sane.
When I told Charlie Zailer that, I believed it. ‘Aidan, you’re making no sense,’ I say shakily.

He grips my arm. ‘Go back to Megson Crescent,’ he whispers, his face close to mine. ‘If it’s the future, it can change. It
has
to change. Tell her not to do the other paintings—make her stop. Tell her to get out of Spilling and go somewhere I won’t find her . . .’

‘Stop it!’ I scream. ‘Let go of me! It’s not true. It’s not possible to see the future! Why won’t you tell me the truth?’

‘Why won’t you tell
me
the truth? What happened at Hansard’s gallery that made you leave? What happened between you and her? You’ve never told me, not really. You want to know what I’ve done with
Abberton
? You want to know where I’m going when I walk out of here now? Tell me the story!’

‘There’s nothing to tell!’ I sob.
No questions; we agreed.
Does he remember how we used to be, how easily we understood each other?

He pushes me away as if he can’t stand to touch me any more, and heads for the door, grabbing his jacket on the way out. Alone in the workshop, I lock the door and turn off all the lights. I huddle in the corner by the electric heater and whisper to myself, ‘There’s nothing to tell,’ as if by saying it I can make it true.

I first noticed the Spilling Gallery because of a painting that was in the window. I’d only lived in the Culver Valley for eleven days at that point, though I regarded it as my home in the sense that I had no plans to go elsewhere. On the day I’d left Lincoln, I’d opened my road atlas at the page that showed a picture of the whole of Britain, closed my eyes and brought my index finger down on a random spot that turned out to be Combingham, a soulless town twelve miles west of Spilling, all precinct centres and roundabouts. I drove there and hated it on sight, so I got back in the car and drove away, with no idea where I was going.

I didn’t go back the way I came; I took random turns, drove random distances before turning again. All I had with me apart from my grubby VW Passat was one hold-all containing a toothbrush and other necessary items; everything else I owned was in storage, and I was prepared never to see any of it again.

I took a left, then a right, then drove straight on for a mile or so. Eventually, when it dawned on me that I would have, at some point, to stop, I set myself a limit: I would drive in any direction that took my fancy, and wherever I found myself after thirty minutes was where I would stay. As long as it wasn’t Lincoln or Combingham it would be all right.

I ended up on Spilling High Street, parked on a double yellow line only metres from Saul Hansard’s gallery and framing shop, though I didn’t notice it then. I don’t know if there were different pictures in the window, or whether my picture was there and I wasn’t paying attention, but as I walked up and down the road looking at my new home town, the Spilling Gallery didn’t register with me at all. At that point I hadn’t thought about paintings or art for more than about twenty seconds in total in my entire life, and most of those twenty seconds had been forced on me by the radio or the television, usually prompting me to change channels.

I noticed a wool shop called Country Yarns, lots of expensive boutiques selling clothes—separate ones for men, women and children. Those selling ‘ladies’ wear’ mostly had long, elegant names that sounded as if they belonged to princesses. I made a point of not looking at the tiny maternity-wear shop with its pistachio-green-painted front, knowing it would never be relevant to me. It was unlikely I’d ever be able to have a baby; I didn’t deserve one, in any case. There were three or four pubs that couldn’t have looked more traditionally English if they’d tried, each with a more elaborately worded sign than the last, advertising the landlords as ‘purveyors of fine quality fayre’. An independent bookshop caught my eye, and I decided I’d pay it a visit as soon as I’d got some accommodation sorted out; I didn’t know anyone in Spilling and planned to avoid all forms of socialising, so I would be doing a lot of reading, and the four books I’d packed in my black hold-all wouldn’t last me long.

In so far as anything could please me, I was pleased to see a market square with a church at one end, and, at the other, a music shop selling sheet music and instruments, a cheese shop and a gift shop called ‘Surprises and Secrets’. The church was a beautiful building and, as long as I didn’t have to set foot inside it, I was prepared to live near it and admire its contribution to the landscape. Even so, I couldn’t help wondering how many of the people who attended its services did so by choice.

I walked into the first pub I came to, the Brown Cow, because there was a board outside it advertising rooms to let. The landlord seemed happy to rent one to me. He asked me how many nights I wanted it for. I opened my mouth, then found I had no answer ready. I didn’t have a plan. ‘Two weeks?’ I suggested tentatively, prepared to be rebuffed.

His eyes lit up. ‘Grand,’ he said. ‘And if you want to stay longer, you’ll be more than welcome.’

Tears pricked my eyes and I had to look away. He was being too nice to me. Not knowing me, he wasn’t aware that I deserved none of his kindness. Maybe I’ll stay here until all my money runs out, I thought, and then go and jump in a river. All the books I’d read over the past four years—since Him and Her—had failed to convince me that this wouldn’t be in many ways the best course of action. I’d made a decent profit from the sale of my house in Lincoln; it would take me a year, maybe two, to give it all away to the storage company in Lincoln and the landlord of the Brown Cow. It would be an interesting experiment, I thought: see how much I wanted to survive. If I ran out of money and wanted to live, I would be forced to do something about it. Or else I could not live. Five or six years after the event, no one would be able to say I hadn’t let a decent interval elapse. I’d have had more than half a decade, by then, to reflect on what I’d done.

My first eleven days in Spilling were unremarkable. I slept a lot, went out for little walks round town. Every day I went to the independent bookshop, ‘Word on the Street’. Never, I thought after my first visit, has a shop had a less appropriate name. Far from being hip and contemporary, Word on the Street—or Word, as everyone in Spilling seemed to call it—looked exactly like my idea of the perfect second-hand bookshop, except with new instead of used stock: low ceilings; creaking floors; several storeys, each a completely different shape from the others; not-quite-straight passageways leading from children’s books to poetry, from the fiction wall to military history.

Within a week I’d bought Word’s entire ‘Mind, Body and Spirit’ section, and the manager had promised to replenish his supplies. I nearly bought a book called
Shame
, the memoir of a woman who had escaped the arranged marriage her parents had tried to force upon her. I took it off the shelf, then happened to glance up and see a label that said ‘Biography’ at the top of the free-standing bookcase. The word made me think of my father, and I had to put the book back, even though I wanted to read it.

On my eleventh morning as a Spilling resident, I went into the cheese shop, Spilling Cheeses—at least half of the local shops were called Spilling this or that—and its owner, instead of asking if she could help me, launched into a monologue. ‘I’ve seen you wandering up and down the high street,’ she said. ‘You do a lot of walking, don’t you? You look at all the shops, but more often that not you don’t go in. I’ve been wondering when you’d come in here.’

This was nearly enough to drive me out, and it certainly put me off buying any cheese, but I didn’t want to appear rude. People who have made no serious mistakes in their lives might not understand this, but once you’ve done something wrong and suffered as a result, good behaviour takes on the utmost importance. I’d resolved never to behave badly again, in my eyes or in the world’s. I knew there were people who were never condemned by anybody, not for a single word or deed: uncontroversial people, ordinary people. That was the sort of person I needed to be.

‘If you like a good walk, you’re crazy to march up and down the pavement, with all the car fumes and the noise,’ said Spilling Cheeses’ owner. ‘There’s lovely countryside less than five minutes away by car—nice and peaceful. Middle of nowhere, really. You won’t meet another soul. I can direct you if you want.’

I smiled, told her ‘No, thank you,’ and left in a hurry, my heart pounding. I didn’t want to be in the middle of nowhere, or even near it. I wanted other souls, plenty of them. I didn’t want to speak to them or strike up friendships, but I wanted them to be there in case one day I needed them. Maybe I’ve chosen the wrong place, I thought. Maybe I should go to Birmingham or Manchester or London. I walked quickly up the street, careful not to look back at the cheese shop. Then I started to feel dizzy, as if I was going to fall. I stopped and leaned my head against the nearest window, hoping the glass would be cold.

It was. I pressed my burning forehead against it and imagined the coolness moving in waves from outside my head to inside. After a few seconds I felt stronger, and peeled myself off the window, embarrassed, hoping no one had seen me. There was an opaque patch on the glass in front of me where my breath had misted it, and behind that, a painting. The frame was black, but the picture itself was long and red. At first I thought red was the only colour, but then I saw small, uneven gold lines behind the red blotches. Standing back, I saw that they weren’t blotches at all, but textured circles and ovals, almost like oversized fingerprints. Each one was a slightly different shade and shape—some were more orange, some seemed to have a blue undertone.

There were dozens of colours in the picture, not one. When I looked carefully, I saw that every colour was in it. And, depending on how far away from it I stood, the intriguing shapes’ relationships to one another changed. From close up, a smeared-looking orange sphere appeared to leap forward, but when I stood back, some of the longer, oval-shaped forms seemed more prominent.

I felt something move inside me, pushing away the layers of fear, guilt, shame and anger that had piled up in my heart and stifled all my memories of past happiness and, along with them, any hope of future happiness, since if you can’t remember ever having felt a certain way then you can’t believe you ever did or will again. It wasn’t only that the painting was beautiful, or that when I looked at it, I felt that a bit of that beauty belonged to me; I felt as if someone was trying to communicate with me. It was a connection, a positive connection with another person, the artist—someone entirely non-threatening because I had never met them, nor was I likely to.

I had to have that picture. I pushed open the door to the Spilling Gallery and told the man I found inside—Saul Hansard—that I wanted the painting in the window and I would pay any price for it. ‘Really?’ He chuckled. ‘What if I said seventy-five thousand pounds?’

‘I haven’t got seventy-five thousand pounds. How much is it?’

‘You’re in luck, then. It’s two hundred and fifty pounds.’

I grinned.
In luck.
It felt true, for the first time in four years. ‘Who painted it? What is it? Do you know anything about it?’