Life became a series of cliches, some of them mouthed by the people around her who loved her, many more of them forming unbidden in her own mind. Bereavement turned out to be beset with comforting formulae for the bereaved, 'no doubt springing from the shared unconscious mind, used by every generation that had preceded her and who had lost someone close to them. As much as anything else, it was trying to escape from these easy platitudes that had helped her conceive the idea of the trip. Bulverton, East Sussex, England, a town so appallingly twinned with Kingwood City that it became an irresistible lure.
At that time the coincidence had beckoned her: she could not find what she needed at home, so maybe it would be there in the English seaside town few people in the US had ever heard of The vagueness of this attraction made one part of her suspicious, but the pull it exerted on the other half was undeniable. lt was not even the unfamiliar, alien quality of Bulverton, as she had imagined it before she got here, because Kingwood City had been just as much an unknown quantity for her before the massacre; if foreignness was the only characteristic pulling at her she might as well have been drawn to that soulless place on Interstate 20 near Abilene. lt would have been easier for her to get to, and cheaper too, but Bulverton was where she knew she had to be.
Now Bulverton's vagueness had become a specific: it was
just a dull, tired, unhappy seaside town, full of the wrong memories and with no conception of its future. The real Bulverton was undermining her resolve, making her think about Andy more than she wanted or needed. Being able to glimpse the losses some of the people had suffered did not help at all. She was not comforted by them, and the stark uselessness of everything that had happened, the pointless waste of lives, the tragic, unintelligent nihilism of the gunman, only underlined her personal tragedy.
Worse, being here was driving her back to the gun. The ExEx scenarios pandered to that fascination.
She could not stop thinking about Elsa Durdle. What she thought out loud, so to speak, was her reaction to the hyperreality of the shareware scenario: the wind, the heat, the lovely old car, the sense of an endless landscape. But deeper feelings, ones she had suppressed until now, were more visceral.
She kept remembering the moment when she opened Elsa Durdle's glove compartment, found the weapon and took it in her hand. The weight of it, the coldness, the feel of it there.
For a few moments she had been reminded of how it felt to be driving to an imminent spree event, with no idea of how it would resolve, but with a loaded gun at her side.
She drove past a sign that told her she was in Ashdown Forest, and on an impulse she turned into a narrow side road. lt led windingly through open, wellwooded countryside. She drove more slowly. The Oasis record was beginning to intrude on her thoughts, so she flicked it off.
She wound down the window, relishing the sweet smell of the woodland, the sound of the tyres on the road, the flow of cold air around her. She slowed the car to a crawl.
Something kept changing her mind about what she wanted to do, where she wanted to go: she told herself it was
the old familiar scents of a wetfloored English winter landscape, mild sunshine on grass and branches and pine needles, things rotting away, mould and fungus and moss.
Teresa saw a cleared space for cars at the side of the road, so she stopped and switched off the ignition. She climbed out and stood for a few minutes on the grassy verge.
Sometimes driving made her think even when she didn't want to.
She had been born into the world of guns: even before she was taken to the USA by her parents she was used to the sight and feel of weapons.
Her father was obsessive about guns; there was no other word for it. He collected guns as other people collected old coins or books. He talked guns, cleaned guns, disassembled and reassembled guns, fired guns, carried guns, subscribed to gun magazines, sent off for gun catalogues, made friends only with those who shared his obsession with guns. There was at least one loaded gun in every room of the house; more than that, probably. There were two in her parents' bedroom, both adapted with hair triggers, one on each side of the bed, ready for use the night the supposed intruder came. There were two more in the kitchen, one attached to the wall next to the door, in case someone tried to break in that way, one concealed in a drawer in case the intrusion came from somewhere else. (But who in their right mind would force an entry into a house where a gun fanatic lived?) There were even two loaded guns stored in a locked drawer in the closet of her own bedroom.
Down in the basement there were more weapons than she had ever been able to count, many of them in pieces, while her dad slowly restored them or cleaned them or customized them in some way. He never went anywhere without a gun either in the car or carried on his belt or under his shirt, ready for use. He belonged to gun clubs and training squads, and four times a year went up into the mountains with a group of his friends, armed to the teeth.
Teresa was target training by the age of ten, and was recognized as an aboveaverage shot by the time she was eleven. Her dad enrolled her into the Junior section of his club, made her show what she could do, entered her for every competition. She won and won; shooting came naturally to her. At fourteen she could outshoot her older cousins, most of the men at the training camps she went to during the summer vacations, and even her father. lt was the thing she did of which he was the proudest.
Her accuracy with a weapon thrilled her. She recognized as natural the weight of the weapon in her hand, the way it balanced there, and the jolt of adrenaline that flowed when the recoil kicked at her arm and shoulder, and because these were exciting to her, the condition of gun ownership and use was integral to her personality and identity. Every time she pulled the trigger she felt total power, fulfilment, certainty.
Standing there by the side of the woodland road, thinking of guns, feeling gorged with her family memories, Teresa was tempted for the first time since her arrival in England to pack her bags and go home. She had friends in Woodbdidge, a career in the Bureau, a house, the remains of a life, a certain place in a culture she understood. England was full of mysteries she didn't want to have to deal with right now. She had made the trip in an attempt to move forward, away from her old itinerant fatherdominated past, yet immersion in the quiet sorrows of Bulverton was stirring up too many memories of what she had wanted to leave.
She knew if Andy could have been there with her he would have gone into one of his sessions of criticizing her their marriage, though happy overall, had had its tensions and
brought
up a dozen similar incidents when she had dithered helplessly about which direction she should take. She deserved it, because making her mind up had always been hard.
