A large sign had been erected in the shape of a clockface. The legend above it said:
?5,000,000, and instead of two hands only one large one swept around, signifying what had been collected so far. lt presently stood at about twentyto, or at just over ?3,000,000, and a red band had been painted in behind it.
Wreaths were laid on the ground beside the door to the building. Teresa stood a short distance from them, unsure of whether to go over and peer at the messages, feeling this would be intrusive, but at the same time she didn't want just to pass by, as if she had not noticed. lt was beginning to seep into her at last: a constant, background sense of the disaster. Not just the wreaths, the memorials, but the fact she was always thinking about it, looking for some sign of it.
She realized she had been seeking it in the expressions on the faces of passersby, and bearing a hitherto unremarked surprise that there were no more physical scars on the town, or more specifically the fact that the people at the hotel hadn't said anything about it. But people hid pain behind calm expressions.
Teresa knew she too was acting like that. What she ought to do was get straight down to what she had planned. Find people, talk to them. Were you here in town on the day it happened? Did you see Grove? Were you hurt? Was anyone you know killed? She wanted to hear herself say it, wanted to hear the answers, wanted to release all the pain that was pent up in these people and in herself
But it was of course none of her business. The disarmingly pleasant aspect of the town, the restrained conduct of the people in the streets, as well as the fact that she knew nobody well enough even to talk with them casually, underlined the fact that she didn't belong. She had wondered about this before she left home, knowing it would probably happen. How would she, an outsider, be treated? Would they welcome her, or would they shun her? Now she knew it would be neither. They left her alone presumably because they would anyway, but also perhaps because that is what they wanted her to do to them.
This was a town that had been bereaved, and she knew something about that. She was an expert, in fact. She thought about Andy again. Why could she never stop? However much time passed it never got better, never got easier. She forced her thoughts away from him, and almost at once a coincidence followed.
As she walked back in the general direction of the hotel, Teresa was thinking about Amy. She had been easy enough to strike up a conversation with, and Teresa wondered if she should start her enquiries with her. She must have been
living in Bulverton last summer when the shooting happened, and would probably know a lot of local people. Working behind the bar in a small hotel had that effect.
As she was musing about this, Teresa reached a paved square where a dozen or so market stalls had been erected. People were shopping, wandering along between the stalls, and a pleasant hubbub of voices mingled with music coming from one or two radios placed at the back of the stalls. Many of the stalls were selling fruit, vegetables or meat, but there were other kinds too: secondhand books, videos and CDs, gardening tools, children's clothes, pine furniture, and so on. lt was at one of these, which sold inexpensive household goods plastic buckets, mops, laundry baskets, brooms that Teresa saw Amy. She appeared to be arguing with the stallholder. He was a man no longer in the first flush of youth, his body apparently once developed but now going to fat; he had straggly hair and a full beard. He looked angry and was talking quickly to Amy, Jabbing his forefinger at her. She was standing her ground, looking almost as irate as he was, her face jutting towards him. She looked pale and determined. At one point she pushed his prodding finger aside, but he brought it back threateningly.
Teresa was immobilized by the sight of the man, and stared at him in amazement. She knew him! But how, and where from?
Other shoppers, who had been walking behind her, were bumping into her and trying to get by, and she realized she was blocking the narrow passage between the stalls. She walked on as slowly as she dared.
As she approached she could see the man's face more clearly, and the certainty of recognition began to recede. His looks were undoubtedly familiar, but now she saw him close up she wondered if it was because he was a type she recognized, rather than an individual. His hair, moustache,
high forehead, incipient pot belly, the dirty white Tshirt under the leather jacket, his thick shoulders and arms, were in themselves unremarkable enough, but there was something about his bearing, the aggressive way he confronted Amy, that reminded her unnervingly of many men she had had to deal with in the US. He looked like he belonged to one of the many armed militias that had formed in the last two decades in the rural USA, buried away on remote farmland, and hidden in woods. Teresa involuntarily cased his body with her eyes, looking for the bulge of a firearm, the linear indentation of a holster strap, or some other hint of a concealed weapon.
Then she checked herself.. this was England, where firearms were banned entirely, where there were no armed militia groups that she had ever heard of, where you could not make the same assumptions based on someone's appearance. For all she knew, men who looked like that in England drove taxis, wrote poetry or sold household goods in street markets.
Even so that first flash of recognition had unnerved her, and as she drew closer she continued to feel wary of him.
Neither he nor Amy noticed her. Whatever they were talking about was nothing to do with her, but now she was so close she experienced another sense of intruding on the lives of others.
She wanted to step right up to them to find out more about what was going on, but couldn't bring herself to do so.
She felt that to halt beside the stall would be to make her interest obvious, so she kept going.
Soon she had passed. She was briefly within earshot, and she was able to make out what they were saying. The man said, '. . . want you out of there. You don't belong, and you bloody know it. If jase were here . . .'
But his words were lost in the general tumult of the place, even though she was only a few feet away from them. Amy made a reply, but it was inaudible.
Teresa walked on, trying not to be curious. Visitors always encroach on other people's lives.
They can't., help it. And they can't help being curious about the people they meet: strangers, but strangers with backgrounds and families and positions of some kind in the place where they are encountered.
Teresa was starting to feel hungry. lt was still only the middle of the morning, but most of her was jetlagged
