“They are about ninety per cent sure she’s called Alicia Botham. I’m sorry.” Then she looked confused. “That came out wrong.”
I nodded. I was confused, too—I couldn’t locate the proper feeling. Was I disappointed? That a dead woman turned out not to be Deb? I desperately didn’t want Deb to be dead. Still, there was another kind of desperation in not knowing.
As we drove back down the lane to the village of Steeple Bumpstead, The Cop turned on the car radio. We heard on the news how a team of cosmologists, measuring the redshift of supernovae, had figured out that the rest of the universe isn’t just moving away from us, it’s speeding up. How must it feel, I wondered, to discover such a desolate truth? I reflected on how much The Cop had come to matter: the world as I understood it was accelerating away from me. And except for The Cop, everything and everyone else were going along with it. She was the only person on my side in this tug-of-war with reality.
There wasn’t any point hanging around Steeple Bumpstead. The Cop and I decided just to pop into the post office before we set off again, to buy some Polos and cans of Coke for the drive home. On the counter, they had for sale a stack of laminated printouts of a corny poem about the village’s name. Once Steeple Bumpstead had a Steeple / Beloved by all the village people…There were several stanzas of this crap. But then there was this bit that I liked about how the weather-cock on top of the steeple had flown off, And left the place no means of knowing / Whatever way the wind was blowing.
Next to the confectionary and the wobbly poetry was a little stand with cheap cigarette lighters, decorative key rings, and assorted small useful items like paper tissues. One of the key rings was decorated with a tiny white plastic wing; perhaps it was meant to represent the wing of an angel. It caught my eye at first because of the poem, but when I picked it up it felt like it belonged in my hand. The Cop saw me holding it and smiled, then she put it on the counter with our Polos and Coke. She pulled her black leather wallet from her back pocket, handed a crisp fiver to the sweet old lady minding the shop, and secured us all we needed for the time being.
It wasn’t up to me. None of it was. When they decided I had bled enough they started cutting. My body was split apart and she was taken out of the middle and then there was nothing left in there. Nothing alive, nothing dead, nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing. I am full of it.
Chapter Eleven
The little white wing found its way onto my choker with the skull and the sequin, as the cold of autumn turned the corner into winter. December set in, bringing bitter mornings and dim days. This cold was not like last year’s living cold. This cold stopped the blood in my fingers, turning them funny shades of red and white.
Still, however bad it got, women would go out to Cindies wearing almost nothing. Cindies was a nightclub, the only one people seemed to talk about as if it were an actual club rather than a kind of glorified student society or college bop. At the same time, everyone laughed about what a shitty club it was. Mostly cheesy dance music, ’80s nights, and foam parties. Hot, dense energy bouncing wall to wall in a closed environment. Compressed and wriggling bodies. To some, an image of hell. It wasn’t even really called Cindies, it was called Fifth Avenue. “Cindies” was a remnant of a brief but luminous previous incarnation. In Cambridge, language doesn’t change fast, and certainly not for such trivial reasons as accuracy, which buckles easily there under the weight of tradition.
I had never been inside Cindies, but often saw drunk students streaming back through the market square as I collected my late-night greasy snacks from the Life Van or the Death Van. Women in tiny black skirts and sparkly boob tubes laughed and yelled and puked and hugged each other, seemingly impenetrable to the sub-zero night air. Perhaps they didn’t even notice it was cold. Like young children at the edge of the sea, oblivious to their blueing lips and chattering teeth because their sandcastles are all-important. Who am I to say they’re wrong? I’m not building anything so spectacular myself.
One night, as I circled indecisively around the terrible food options, I saw a trickle of revellers dressed in Cindies clothes approaching me. Something was different, though. They were strangely subdued. As my eyes followed the trickle back towards its source, it became a stream, then a flood. The entire club had to be emptying all at once. But why so early? It was barely midnight. And why was their customary exuberance so eerily muted? This felt like a parade of shadows.
Eventually, a louder group came by, led by a man I recognized from my year. He was one of those whose flow of speech could not be brooked by any force in the world. Even when he wasn’t actually speaking, you could see the floodwaters building behind an inadequate dam, and it was impossible to relax knowing it could burst at any second. When it did, he went off indiscriminately in all directions.
Now he was dishevelled, with what looked like grey dust in his hair and clothes. He was flanked by a gaggle of men who responded with expressive faces, yeahs, whoas, and other markers of an appreciative,
