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Magpies

She talked like she had smoke caught between the gaps in her teeth; low and sweet and tantalisingly husky. You might have mistaken it for a man’s voice had it been just a tone or two lower, but she or some quirk of evolution had pitched it just right. When I first met her, I assumed she was a heavy smoker; as it turned out, she had never smoked in her life—her voice had just turned out that way. It had a lilt to it that spoke of snow and Sweden, and she had that strange sing-song accent of a Swede speaking English.

She wasn’t beautiful then, at least not in the common sense of the word; her face was a little long around the chin, her eyes a little wide, her teeth a little too white, her hair a shade too red for her pale face. She wasn’t to become really beautiful until she was pushing thirty, and that bloom of youth that lends all young girls a certain anonymity had vanished. But at twenty, there was something about her—something that shone out from her smile and her eyes and the way she would laugh with her head thrown as far back as she could push it. In anyone else, it would have seemed pretentious; in her, it was enchanting.

Anna, they called her. I never found out why; it wasn’t her real name, that was for sure. I learnt a little about her childhood during our frequent late-night talks; not much, but enough. Enough to know her parents would never have called her anything so strait-laced, so damn conventional. It suited her, though. Anna.

On the day that I met her, I hadn’t been expecting to meet anyone. Not that I went around expecting to meet people: but that day in particular I had expected to spend alone. It was Christmas Eve, you see, and I hadn’t talked to anyone in weeks: I’d thanked shopkeepers and the like, but nothing more than a couple of words each way. I wasn’t exactly lonely, but I was fast approaching it. After spending the day loping round the town, avoiding the last-minute pulses of Christmas shoppers being forced through the streets like blood through the arteries of a body, I wound up on the old side of town. There were still cobbled streets then, just a few, preserved between the quieter rows of ancient houses and pubs. One of these pubs I remember in particular—although God knows I’d visited a few in that part of town—for the simple reason that it was Anna’s pub.

She didn’t own it, of course; but we’d never seen the owner, even those of us who’d spent whole days hunched over pints of evil-smelling beer. So it might as well have been Anna’s pub. The locals even called it that, when they had to call it something. It had a name, but I don’t quite recall what it was: the Cat and Wheel, perhaps, as I seem to remember Anna leaning out of the first floor window and reaching across to re-paint the cat; but I have a tendency to confuse my memories of Anna through going over them so much, so the cat may be an embellishment on my part.

It had just started to rain that Christmas Eve, otherwise I would given up and gone home; I had barely enough money left in the pockets of my overcoat for a pint, and despite the amount of whisky sloshing about in my belly, I still recalled that I had a landlord to pay come morning. But by the time I’d rationalised all of this, and promised myself I’d shove my hands back in my pockets and turn away, it was fairly pissing down. I ducked into the first pub I saw, more on instinct than from anything else: besides, the lights were glowing out warmly from the diamond glass windows (later on I discovered the warmth was due to the layers of accumulated grime on the glass: cleaned, the light was colder and harsher).

I have always loved pubs. Back in the village where I was born, my father would carry me through the tall wooden door of our local on his shoulders, and a crowd of old fishermen and farmers would gather round to pay him homage. He was a sort of king, my father; a king among the scrabblers, the ratters, the beggars; Lord of all those who cursed life for a b***h and howled at the doors of rich men. The local pub was his kingdom, and my most enduring memory of him is that of a man leant against one side of an inglenook fireplace, antique copper kettle hanging jauntily over a blazing fire—no health and safety laws in those days—and a rough-and-tumble dog curled up at his feet.

Anna’s pub—or whatever name it really had—reminded me faintly of that old Devon boozer. It had the same atmosphere, by which I mean it was similarly clogged with a stench of stale beer and sweat and ancient wooden stools. It was beautiful. I must looked a right idiot, standing in the doorway with one hand grasping the frame and the other stretched out at my side as if I could grasp the stink and hold it to my body. It was then that I caught Anna’s eye.

The pub was clearly popular, and even on Christmas Eve—or perhaps especially on Christmas Eve, considering the number of men who looked to be harassed fathers escaping from overly exuberant children—it was packed to the rafters. Most of them were men, with the occasional wife or girlfriend; the former usually holding her own pint loosely in her hand and guffawing along with rest, the latter clutching the arm of her boyfriend as if he were a rock in a sea of men. There was no open fire here, but the radiators ensured that the whole pub was heated to the point of discomfort (and perhaps a little beyond). Some took the heat worse than others, and every so often someone would make a dash for the door and lean out into the cold rain, downing lungfuls of the freezing air. Every table was filled, every seat occupied, every spare patch of ground accounted for by a pair of feet. Looking out at it from my spot by the door, something made me loathe to enter the seething mass—and I am by no means a man who shies away from crowds. But the sheer quantity of people, most carousing, some huddled over their pint glasses in a bubble of silence, one passed out beneath a table—it unnerved me a little.

And then there was Anna.

As I said, I caught her eye across the crowds of people; but she didn’t catch my eye, or at least I assume she didn’t. I caught hers as she was on the point of turning to hand a glass to an old man who had draped himself over the bar, and she didn’t pause to hold my gaze. She kept turning, and I dropped my eyes. But that one look was enough to draw me across the pub, weaving my way in and out of chattering groups. Halfway across, when a man unknowingly shoved his elbow in my face and sloshed a good deal of putrid cider down my front, I almost turned back; but then a glimpse of Anna’s hair, flashing copper in the wan light from the TV screen, dragged me on. I swear, it was as if a fishhook had caught me by the waist; and Anna was a fisherman on the bank—the bar—of the river, reeling me onwards and onwards.

At the bar, I pushed in among the people there and secured myself a spot (by use of my elbows mainly, although I wasn’t above a little push with my feet if the going got tough). And there she was: glowing and gleaming like some polished figurine of a goddess. And though I don’t mean to romanticise this, I must out of necessity bring a little romance to it; but the kind of romance brought about by a couple of stiff whiskies ladled on top of a melancholy mood.

I have already mentioned her hair, a waterfall of copper-red curls (now I wonder if she coloured them, and think she must have, to achieve such a glorious lustre), and her smile and her teeth and her eyes and the way she pushed her head back on her neck when she laughed so that it looked as if it should snap: and her voice. Most of all, her voice. Although it was low, and seemed as it should have been quiet, it carried effortlessly above the voices of the crowds in the pub, so that their screeches fell to a murmur whenever she spoke or laughed.

At most bars, I would have snapped a finger to catch the bartender’s attention, or thrown caution to the winds and leant right out into their path to grab them by their apron strings. But not Anna. Even if I had had the guts to raise my hand and act so imperiously, I doubt it would have waylaid her for even a moment; she waltzed from end to end of the bar like a ballerina, though she was by no means dainty. Even with a pint in each hand and a foil packet of nuts clenched between her incisors, she fairly glided, and never spilt a drop. It was some time before she noticed me, squeezed in as I was between two particularly loud customers. One, I remember, had his back pressed against my left arm, and I could feel every bone in his back rippling when he laughed. Finally, Anna turned to me, and raised one thick but elegantly shaped eyebrow.

“Pint, please,” I choked out. I could have slapped myself over the forehead afterwards for the weakness of my voice, but thank God, Anna didn’t seem to have noticed. She danced back over to the beer pumps and drew me a beer, effortlessly manhandling the glass to create a perfect head. If I hadn’t already been infatuated, I would have fallen for her then. Setting it down on the bar before me, she waltzed away to serve another customer, leaving me staring at a single droplet of beer making its way steadily down the glass.

I took my time with that beer; as far as I can tell, I’d entered the bar around seven, and I was still there at ten when Anna rang the bell for drinking up time—and there was still just under an inch of beer left in the glass. As the other customers filed out into the street, screaming season’s greetings to the clouds that had long since stopped emptying their loads, I remained seated at the bar, watching the cobwebbed remains of my foam slide down into the last of the beer. I sensed more than saw Anna standing over me; a buzz in the air, perhaps, or maybe I’d heard her step up; it was quiet enough in the bar then that I could have heard the tread of her high-heeled feet.

“Drink up,” she said, and now that the pub had emptied, her voice, low and sweet, seemed to knock against the rafters and fill the room with a new kind of warmth, more tender and loving than either the harsh heat of the radiators or the oppressive heat of a crowd of human bodies. And there was still whisky inside of me, now mixing with the cheap beer and suffusing into my brain; and I was far from home, in a city where I had no friends and probably no home (after all, I’d just spent the last of my money on booze); and most of all, most of all there was Anna and the stench of her cheap perfume, all alcohol and a hint of manufactured lavender, which now slapped my face with all the force of a mother’s hand.

So I started crying.

Not with fuss and a loud fanfare, but quietly, gradually. My face must have been a sight, layered in grime as it was, and now those treacherous lines of salt water carving their way into the dirt. I closed my eyes in an attempt to hold them back, and to escape Anna’s own eyes, which I knew must be filling with scorn as fast as mine were filling with tears. Insufferably, unstoppably, I felt one of them slide off the end of my chin and then drop with a ting into the still unfinished glass of beer. The silence reeled out, a taut string of calm; I felt as if the whole pub were filled again with silent crowds, all of them watching me, all of them sneering.

Then a hand grasped my chin roughly, and I felt a coarse tissue rubbing over my face. The hand was warm as blood, and its long nails were digging slightly into the skin of my right cheek, most likely making tiny crescent-moon impressions that would vanish as soon as the hand was removed.

When Anna was done cleaning my face, she stepped back and I opened my eyes. We surveyed each other warily as she crushed the filthy tissue into a ball, and chucked it behind her shoulder. It landed squarely and softly in the fire-bucket.

“I’m Anna,” she said. “Let me get you a coffee.”

After she’d bolted the pub doors and poured herself a brandy, she was as good as her word, and made me a whole pot of strong black coffee. It was good coffee, too, not the stuff she kept behind the bar; it turned out she had a flat above the pub. Around eleven o’clock, we moved up there, as the sofa in her ramshackle living room was still better than the stools in the bar, since the latter were so polished by years of arses that it was difficult to sit still on them; any real conversation was impossible while seated there. I spent the night on her sofa, and the night after that, and on and on for what must have been months. She never asked for rent, though she had every right to; after all, I was a stranger. I could have been anyone.

On Christmas morning, I woke to the smell of bacon frying. For a moment, I thought I’d fallen out of this time and back into my childhood, when my mother would cook me breakfast on Christmas mornings and wake me up with a kiss and a hug. No such love from Anna, of course: she left me to lie in until I felt alive enough to get up and eat breakfast. I’d be lying if I said it was perfect: by her own admission, Anna was no cook. The bacon was greasy and burnt black in places. I avoided thinking about the state of the hob, as the fleeting glance I’d had of her tiny kitchen had assured me I’d be eating out as much possible if I did stay with her. That whole day we spent outside in the rain-washed streets of the city, walking side by side past shop windows that shone with toys and food. We were close enough to hold hands; but while she would have suffered my grip if I’d reached out, I already knew enough to keep my hands to myself. The next day was much the same, except that we wandered through a park some time after noon. Anna paused by the duck-pond and crouched down by the edge, tucking her long skirt elegantly between her thighs.

“When I was a child,” she began, in that curious sing-song accent she had, “I used to catch ducks at the park and take them home to my mother. She would take them into the wood-shed and cut their heads off with a knife, the large one from the kitchen. Then we’d pluck them together and hang them from the ceiling in the larder.”

“Wasn’t that illegal?” I asked. She shrugged.

“I do not think anyone cared. They were ducks.” With that, she stood up abruptly and brushed a spot of mud from her skirt. “There is a café around here which serves good soup. We’ll go there.”

The next day the pub was open again, and she served drinks to the crowds while I moped around upstairs in her flat. The next day was the same, and the day after that, and after that; sometimes I asked her if she ever had a day off, but most often she would retreat to the safety of her bedroom, the door of which remained permanently closed. We were like brother and sister, except we—or at least I—never dared to raise our voices to each other. Sometimes I would go out of my way to provoke her (I am ashamed, now, that I was ever so childish), but Anna would only ever turn her face to the side and smile slightly. At times like that I would watch the strong curve of her chin and clench my fists in something that wasn’t quite rage, but more irritation with the flawless mask of her serenity.

This continued for months. How many, I can’t be sure: I only left the sanctuary of Anna’s flat to travel down the narrow flight of stairs to the bar, and I only left the bar when hunger drove me across the street to the late-night corner shop. My life was lived entirely between these three places, and each evening found me curled up on Anna’s sofa with the volume of the TV turned up as loud as it would go, in a vain attempt to drown out the laughter seeping up from the pub and through the floorboards.

Some nights Anna wouldn’t come home at all, and she’d roll up the next morning stinking of unwashed bed sheets and stale sweat. Once—just once, but it was enough—she came through the door with a black eye. Ignoring me, she went straight for the kitchen and rooted around in there until she’d found a piece of cloth, stained by years of muck and hot water. Filling it with ice, she pressed it hard to her eye. I winced on her behalf, but she remained motionless, right hand holding the ice to her eye and the left flat out against her side; if that’d been me, I would have been clenching that hand until my nails broke the skin of my palm.

And then some nights—not many, but just enough so that I stayed on uncomplaining—not that she did it purposefully—she’d stay in and we’d glue ourselves to her tiny black-and-white set, watching the old films they throw onto late-night TV schedules. The nearness of her skin anchored me to the sofa, and I’d always pray that the film would have funny parts in it: that way, I’d get to see and hear her laugh. Those late-night, early-morning moments were the only times I got to see her laugh without going down to the bar. And I couldn’t do that: going down to the bar meant sharing her with a hundred greedy eyes, meant watching them watching her laugh and feeling jealousy—which I had no right to feel, as Anna wasn’t really mine, wasn’t really anybody’s—strip layers off the inside of my guts.

One time there was a fly on the screen. It crawled across the heroine’s face as she stared up into that of her lover’s, and seemed to disappear into the black cherry-bud hole of her mouth. Anna laughed. I glanced over, and noted that she was completely relaxed, her shoulders pressed lightly against the beaten leather back of the sofa.

“Anna,” I said, “those bruises. Where do you get them from?”

Looking back now, I can scarcely believe I had the audacity to ask, and in such an imperious tone. But I was young, and foolish—excuses we all use at one time or another.

Anna bridled. I could almost sense her drawing away from me on the sofa, widening the gap between us until it became a chasm, gaping and greedy. Silence stretched out like a long thread between us, which threatened to snap and separate us forever. On the TV screen, the lovers were dancing, tiny black and white blobs which seemed to fall away from me as I watched. She never answered.

The next day was a Sunday, and although usually the bar would have been illicitly open for much of the day, there was some public holiday or religious festival—I didn’t know which one—and so the owner of the bar gave Anna the day off. Of course, we went walking. Anna knew nobody else in the city, and was desperate for company; and while I had friends there, I had long since stopped seeing them. Besides, I call them friends only in the loosest possible sense of the word. They were barflies and down-and-outs, failures and petty criminals, the dregs of society. We used to sit in dingy pubs down tiny alleyways and drink until none of us could remember why we were drinking.

There was a street not far from the pub that was lined with lime trees. It must have been spring by then, for they were bursting with green, and the sun, although not hot, was bright and warm enough that the cafes that appeared at regular intervals along the street had thrown caution to the winds, and brought their long-neglected tables and chairs out onto the pavements. We stopped at one such café, and took a table directly beneath one of the lime trees, so that its leaves cast us almost entirely into shadow. I ordered us two black coffees.

Anna pointed up into the tree. “Look,” she said. “A magpie.”

“One for sorrow,” I commented. She turned to me, one eyebrow raised. “My mother used to tell me you could tell the future by counting magpies. One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl, four for a boy. Five for silver, six for gold, seven for a secret never to be told.” By the end of the rhyme, I was rushing to finish; I could tell by Anna’s expression that she was unimpressed. She looked back up at the bird before I had completed the last line.

“My father used to kill magpies,” she murmured.

“And your mother killed ducks.”

“Yes,” she said. “But she did that because we were poor, and were needing food. My father just liked to be killing magpies. Once he came back into the house and his hands were covered in blood, and he was holding a magpie head in one hand—“

“I don’t believe you,” I said abruptly. That caught her attention. “Nobody does that. I don’t believe your parents were as strange as you make out. I bet you lived in Copenhagen and ate nothing but pre-packaged food.”

Anna was still for a moment; then she laughed. The magpie flew up into the air in a flurry of leaves and disappeared from sight. I watched Anna’s eyes follow the path of its flight as she slurped her coffee. It was a long time before either of us spoke again. All through it, there was the constant chatter of the couple seated a few tables away, sipping at tall, lurid green drinks that clashed horribly with the woman’s pink floral dress. Snatches of conversation floated our way: something about someone’s mother, and new curtains, and a ruined carpet.

The sound of the church bells broke into the tentative silence that had surrounded Anna and myself. They rang out beautifully, their notes pealing proudly through the street and weaving in and out of the lime trees.

“Interesting,” Anna said quite suddenly, “to think that those bells are being rung by such ugly people.” She had never sounded so cruel. Her tone—and words—clashed alarmingly with the subtle smoothness of her voice. I had intended to shoot her a quick glance, but lingered for longer when I saw a liquid bead of enticingly black coffee slide down her top lip and into the long line of her mouth. “I mean,” she continued, “I know for a fact that at this very moment there is a fat man with a lisp clasping the rope with hands that—honestly—are too like slabs of raw meat to seem capable of creating such a lovely sound.” She laughed again. “Interesting.”

I watched her place the coffee cup back on the table. The white china rim now had a faint suggestion of red lipstick: I hadn’t realised she wore the stuff. When she spoke again, her voice sounded claggier and choked up. I couldn’t help but think about the way her lips moved, and their colour, which now seemed unnaturally red. I even imagined that I could taste the lipstick on my own mouth, and I had to stick out my tongue and run it along my bottom lip to assure myself it was naked: naked and pure. Anna was still speaking.

I downed my coffee in one, but regretted this instantly. It was still too hot, and left the inside of my mouth feeling paradoxically dry and raw. I set it down on the table with an audible clink, so that my cup and Anna’s now stood opposite each other. The air around my head and arms felt heavy. It took me some time—or so it seemed to me—to push back my chair, which jarred against the pavement slabs with a loud scraping sound.

Far away at the end of the street, people began pouring out of the church: first in ones or twos, those few desperate to leave, those who had sat in the back rows of the pews and fidgeted and sweated and itched all through the service. Then the bulk of worshippers, the older ones in Sunday best and the younger in jeans and shirts only slightly smarter than their everyday wear. And then the faithful, who filled the front rows and gazed up at the vicar as if he were Jesus Christ himself. They oozed down past the lime trees, towards where I stood and Anna sat.

As they passed, I slotted my body neatly in between two chattering groups, and allowed myself to be swept away by the press of people. There was no temptation to look back, although many times in the early hours of mornings I had imagined leaving: imagined walking away on an empty street, some time in the evening or morning, so that my shadow stretched out long and grey before me. Lying on Anna’s sofa, I had imagined that a chain would be looped around my neck and anchored to her eyes, then tightened and tightened and tightened until the need to look back was nigh on unbearable.

But there were only the random scraps of conversation that filtered through from the crowd, and the rawness of my burnt mouth, and the tread of my feet on the concrete. Out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw a single magpie flash past and settle somewhere behind me: but it was most likely only a black plastic bag tumbling through the trees.

The main door of the pub was locked, but the spare key was still where Anna had left it that morning, tucked under the filthy black mat by the back door. I let myself into her flat and collected what few possessions I had into a frayed canvas bag. From under the sofa, I dragged out my jacket, which had remained under there since our walk in the park all those months ago. I draped it neatly over the crook of my left arm, picked up the bag, and shut the door smartly behind me.

Months later, as I was draped over a filthy sink in some pub toilet, the spare key fell out of the pocket where I’d been keeping it and slipped between the gaps in the plughole. I turned on the cold tap and sent icy water down after it, hoping it’d wash away to the sea, maybe fetch up on a beach somewhere hot and exotic. By then I’d left the city and struck out for the north: an old acquaintance of mine had tipped me off about some jobs that were going free up there. I don’t remember the name of the place, only the few square feet of muck and tattered sheets that made up the room I rented there. After that, there were more dead-end jobs in dead-end places; so many that I don’t quite recall the names of the places, let alone the people I worked with or the things I did. When I had money, I drank: I remember that. Probably there were nights in hostels, or more likely in hospitals with a two-bit nurse sleeping in the corner. Probably there were nights when I had to drink before I slept: drink until I stopped thinking about Anna and the world started making sense.

At some point there must have been a village, and a farm. I stopped to rest under one of the trees, leaning my right palm into the bark until I knew the pattern of the wood must be etching itself onto my skin. A sudden rustle of leaves above my head made me look up sharply. A magpie was watching me. I’ve never been a violent man, but if I’d had a gun in my pocket I would have shot the damn thing dead.

And then it was five years since I’d seen her. I didn’t suddenly wake up and realise that, of course: there was no sudden flash of light, no epiphany. Nothing changed overnight. But gradually, relentlessly, Anna dropped out of the forefront of my mind and into that timeless place called memory.

And then it was ten years.

You could say that I’d wasted my life; many did. But that all depends on what you think of as wasting. Ten years of sloping around small towns, living off the backs of friends who were barely friends at all; ten years of sleeping badly, so that far too often I ended up staying awake ‘til the dawn with whoever I happened to be staying with at the time, and drinking whatever cheap booze we had left at the bottom of their cupboard. That might have been termed wasting if I’d ever had the intention of doing anything else with my life: but living, just living, was nearly enough.

I’d somehow made my way back down south, and wound up in a decrepit suburb, sleeping on the floor of a man called Jake. He was tall and spider-like. He had beautiful fingers. They curled around bottles as if the curve of the glass was a woman’s hips; but harder, colder. Jake had a wife (or a girlfriend, really, since I never figured Jake to be the marrying type). She was as different from Anna as she could be in every way but one. Her hair was bleached a peroxide sort of blonde, the dark roots always just on the verge of claiming it back. Her face was small like that of a weasel or a rabbit, squashed up, all centred around her milky brown eyes, which were oddly like those of a dog. Her voice was high and fluting and somehow shallow.

But when she laughed—which, to tell the truth, wasn’t all that often—she looked just like Anna. At least, she did to my alcohol addled eyes. Jake called her Betsy.

“It ain’t my real name,” she said to me once. “That’s Elisabeth, but Jake don’t really like that name. He says it’s too damn posh for me.”

I nodded. She passed me another drink and went on talking.

“You know Jake’s thinkin’ of leavin’ this place? He got another job somewhere south of here. Good money. Good prospects, too, though I’m sure as hell Jake ain’t thinkin’ too much on those.” She broke off to take a swig from her vodka. I wanted to say something to make her laugh like she had a week before, but I didn’t know her that well, and wasn’t in any case used to female company. Betsy was watching me.

“Where’d you meet Jake?”

“Somewhere,” I said. “A bar, probably.”

Betsy nodded. “Figures. He spends most of his damn time in bars. You know—“ whatever she’d been about to say, it never got said. Her mouth was left hanging slackly open, and for a moment her face looked like it might if she were dead: all loose and unfocused. Jake was lounging against the frame of the door that led through into the kitchen, keys dangling jauntily from one outstretched finger.

“Baby’s cryin’,” he said.

It wasn’t, or not so I could hear. Betsy got up anyway, and left through the door on the other side of the room. It didn’t quite fit the frame, and kept on swinging slightly long after she’d gone. Jake picked up a beer from the kitchen counter and slumped down on the sofa. The springs creaked and threatened to spring out from the fabric. I thought about how it might feel if one pierced the jelly of your eyeball. I didn’t flinch.

“Betsy,” Jake said, “Betsy doesn’t know how good she’s got it. I could leave any time I wanted, but I haven’t yet, and it’s been two years this spring.”

I remembered then that I hadn’t met Jake in a bar at all, but in a truck, his truck. He’d stopped to pick me up while I was hitchhiking from one job to the next, and then we’d gone to a bar out on the motorway at three in the morning and got drunk together. Somewhere along the way he’d started telling me about his girl, Betsy, and their baby that he was scared to hold in case he dropped it and it shattered like cheap glass on the bathroom tiles. Then around five we got back in the truck and drove on to his flat. It was the basement of a terraced house, a tall brick thing with a garden that wasn’t even a garden anymore, but a flat plateau of concrete and gravel.

“I’m going on down to the centre tonight,” Jake was saying. “Want to tag along?”

“The city centre?”

“What other centre is there?”

I couldn’t say no. It would have been rude; Jake was my host, and I didn’t yet know him well enough to steer so close to offending him. Besides, staying in with Betsy and the baby didn’t appeal. So around eight that night we went out in Jake’s old car, which he’d had for more than twenty years, so far as I could tell, and drove on down to the centre.

It hadn’t changed much, in the ten years since I’d been there. Of course there had been superficial changes: new buildings put up, old ones taken down, new clothes on the bodies of the crowds. But the crowds were still pulsing through the streets, and surrounding the cacophonous hub of the centre there were still a number of quieter, cobbled streets that were home to the same old dingy pubs. Thankfully Jake wasn’t a sentimentalist: after illegally shoving the car into a dark alleyway behind a cinema, he took us straight to a bar on the most crowded street, with the sole intention of getting drunk.

The bar was brimming with people, and the collective sound of their chatter and the heat of their bodies and breath filled the darkened room. Women were perched on ledges and windowsills, like great black vultures in their dim dresses and hunched shoulders. Jake had disappeared by the time I made it to the bar for the second time, pushing against the swells of people. I leant for a moment on the sleek black marble of the bar, and then straightened my spine so I was looking right at the bartender, who had stopped in front of me.

She was beautiful, in a sort of polished and veneered way: around nineteen, I guessed, all crisp and clean in a white shirt and short black skirt. Even from across the divide of the bar, I could smell her perfume. It was cloying and floral, probably expensive. Most likely she was a student, working because it was the done thing rather than out of necessity. A second after seeing her I couldn’t have told you even the colour of her hair: she was indistinguishable from all the others in the bar, prettily anonymous and easily forgotten. I bought a pint and levered myself back through the crowd until I reached the place where I thought I’d last seen Jake. The crowd was immense in its sound, and swelling by the second. There was a hot buzzing somewhere in the back of my head, and with my free hand I pressed my skull to stop it falling apart and leaking what was left of my brain out onto the crowd.

Someone else wasn’t so lucky. A girl dropped out of the press of bodies and fell nearly at my feet, into one of the few patches of open ground. Somehow the people made space, but the thump of the music and of their voices kept on. Even those gathered round the rim of my sight were loud, though their gazes were directed towards the girl on the floor. Only she and I were silent and still, pacing in our own cage and separated from the crowd.

And then a woman knelt down by the girl’s side and brushed back the hair from her face, and with her other hand she tenderly closed the girl’s eyes; and in that moment of time when the dilated pupils seemed to pierce into my skull, I saw that it was Anna.

At some point in the decade since I’d left, she’d grown into her features, and even as her face slackened she was so stunning, so strikingly beautiful, that I doubted it was her. I thought that it must be a doppelganger, a double of some sort: even the colour of her hair, always too burningly bright for the paleness of her skin, had deepened and mellowed so that it enhanced rather than drowned out her face.

And then the silence arrived, spreading out from her body like ripples on water that has previously been perfectly still. The music was switched off in a flurry of curses, and then the silence became absolute. Outside there was laughter and screeches and drunken groups of friends falling over each other and holding one another up; inside, there was me, and Anna, and the silent crowd of watchers.

In the distance, a siren started to wail.

After that, everything seemed clear and simple. The ring on Anna’s finger told me all that I needed to know—she’d always hated the feel of metal on her hands and wrists—but nevertheless I stayed on until I saw him arrive. He was staid and sombre, and he looked at Anna as if she were a single drop of water and he a man dying of thirst. They bundled her up under a red sheet and took her away. He went with her and never looked back.

I’ll admit to feelings of regret—that I didn’t see her laugh, or hear the harmonies of her voice rising above those of the crowd—but also to relief. Relief that I hadn’t caught her eye through the shifting groups, relief that the fishhook barbs of her smile hadn’t stuck in my gut and reeled me in. Let her husband deal with the forms and funeral and the long nights alone, wasting his life for the want of her smile.

Statements were taken. Comments were made. Opinions were voiced loudly in the cold air outside the bar. The management fretted visibly. Somewhere in the midst of it all Jake appeared, red-cheeked and merry, with a bottle in each hand and a girl trailing along in his wake.

“Sorry I had to leave,” he said, casually. “Spotted a mate of mine going into a bar down the street. You ready to go?” I looked past him to where the girl was scuffling her feet. He half-turned towards her, and laughed. “Scat,” he called back to her. “Go on. Time you were tucked up in bed.” Then he laughed again, and went to fetch the car from the alleyway where he’d parked it.

“What’s your name?” I asked the girl.

“Alison,” she said, sullenly. “He’s not coming back, is he?”

“He’s married. Or near as, anyway.”

Alison gave me a long, even look. Then the corners of her mouth twitched, and she tossed her hair back from her eyes.

“You don’t seem like the type he usually hangs out with,” she said. “They’re tougher, generally, and they don’t look—as nice—as you.”

“I haven’t known him long,” I replied, cautiously. “Alison. Alison, how old are you? I mean, you look so young. Too young to be around Jake.”

“Eighteen next month,” she countered. “Jake buys me stuff. You’ve got a problem with that?”

“No,” I said.

Her face shone in the light beaming out from inside the bar. Her lips, outlined in a harsh and sensual red, pursed themselves up instead of quivering, then relaxed back down into a smile that was more a sneer than anything else. I wanted to see her laugh. I wanted to see if she threw her head back and laughed as if she hadn’t a care in the world. I wanted to hear her talk.

“Let me get you a coffee,” I said.