Her Fearful Symmetry

  The twins laid the passports on the table and looked at Edie. Edie's heart beat fast. You have no idea. Don't ask. It's none of your business. Just let me be. Let me be. She stared back at them, poker-faced. 'Why didn't she leave it to you, Mom?' asked Valentina.

  Edie glanced at Jack. 'I don't know,' she said. 'You'd have to ask her.'

  Jack said, 'Your mother doesn't want to talk about it.' He gathered the papers that were strewn across the table into a stack, tapped the bottom of the stack against the table to align it and handed it to Julia. He stood up. 'What's for breakfast?'

  'Pancakes,' said Valentina. They all stood, all tried to segue into the normal Saturday-morning routine. Edie poured herself more coffee and steadied the cup with two hands as she drank it. She's frightened, Valentina thought, and was frightened herself. Julia walked down the hall doing a little dance, holding the will over her head as though she were fording a rising river. She went into their bedroom and closed the door. Then she began jumping in place on the thick carpeting, her fists pounding the air over her head, shouting silently, Yes! Yes! Yes!

  That night the twins lay in Julia's bed, facing each other. Valentina's bed was rumpled but unused. Their feet were touching. The twins smelled faintly of sea kelp and something sweet; they were trying out a new body lotion. They could hear the settling noises their house made in the night. Their bedroom was dimly illuminated by the blue Hanukkah lights they had strung around the wrought-iron headboards of their beds.

  Julia opened her eyes and saw that Valentina was staring at her. 'Hey, Mouse.'

  Valentina whispered, 'I'm afraid.'

  'I know.'

  'Aren't you?'

  'No.'

  Valentina closed her eyes. Of course not.

  'It'll be great, Mouse. We'll have our own apartment, we won't have to work, at least for a while; we can do whatever we want. It's, like, total freedom, you know?'

  'Total freedom to do what, exactly?'

  Julia shifted onto her back. Oh God, Mouse, don't be such a Mouse. 'I'll be there. You'll be there. What else do we need?'

  'I thought we were going back to college. You promised.'

  'We'll go to college in London.'

  'But that's a year from now.'

  Julia didn't answer. Valentina stared into Julia's ear. In the semi-dark it was like a little mysterious tunnel that led into Julia's brain. If I were tiny I would crawl in there and tell you what to do and you would think it was your own idea.

  Julia said, 'It's only for a year. If we don't like it we'll sell it and come back.'

  Valentina was silent.

  After a while Julia took her hand, interlaced their fingers. 'We've got to prepare. We don't want to be like those dumb Americans who go to Europe and only eat at McDonald's and speak English real loud instead of the local language.'

  'But they speak English in England.'

  'You know what I mean, Mouse. We need to study.'

  'Okay.'

  'Okay.' They shifted so that they lay side by side, shoulders touching, hands clasped. Valentina thought, Maybe in London we can have a bigger bed. Julia stared at the terrible Home Depot light fixture on the ceiling, mentally listing all the things they would need to find out about: exchange rates, vaccinations, soccer, the Royal Family ...

  Valentina lay in Julia's bed thinking about the inside of Julia's ear, how her own ear was the exact reverse, and if she pressed her ear against Julia's and trapped a sound, would it oscillate back and forth endlessly, confused and forlorn? Would I hear it backwards? What if it was a London sound, like cars driving on the wrong side of the road; then maybe I would hear it forwards and it would be backwards for Julia. Maybe in London everything will be opposite from here ... I'll do what I want; no one will be the boss of me ... Valentina listened to Julia breathing. She tried to imagine what she would do if it was just her, on her own. But she had never done anything on her own, so she struggled to formulate some kind of plan, and then gave up, exhausted.

  Edie lay in bed waiting for Jack to fall asleep. Usually she tried to get to sleep first, because Jack snored, but tonight her mind was racing and she knew it was pointless to even try. Finally she turned onto her side and found Jack facing her with his eyes open.

  'It'll be all right,' said Jack. 'They've been away before and it was all right.'

  'This is different.'

  'Because it's Elspeth?'

  'Maybe,' she said. 'Or, just - it's so far away. I don't want them there.'

  He put his arm around her waist and she burrowed into him. I'm safe. I'm safe here. Jack was her bomb shelter, her human shield. 'Remember when they were at Cornell?' he said. 'How great it was to have the house to ourselves?'

  'Yeah ...' It had been a revelation: married life without children was a blast. For a while, anyway.

  'They're twenty years old, Edie. They should have been long gone. We should have sent them to separate schools,' said Jack.

  She sighed. You don't understand. 'It's too late. Elspeth's taken it out of our hands.'

  'Maybe she's done us a favour.'

  Edie didn't reply. Jack said, 'When you were their age you were very eager to be on your own, as I recall.'

  'That was different.'

  He waited for her to continue. When she didn't, he said, very quietly, 'Why, Edie? Why was it different?' But she pressed her lips together and closed her eyes. He said, 'You could tell me.'

  She opened her eyes and smiled. 'There's nothing to tell, Jack.' She turned again, so she faced away from him. 'We should try to sleep.'

  That was close, he thought. He wasn't sure if he was disappointed or relieved. 'Okay,' Jack said. They lay together for a long time, listening to each other's breathing, until Jack began to snore and Edie was alone with her thoughts.

  BLEACH

  THE INVENTION OF the Internet had allowed Martin to abandon the outside world. Or rather, the Internet had enabled him to relegate that world to the role of support system for his world, the one that flourished inside his flat.

  Martin had not expected Marijke to leave him. She had acquiesced in his rituals, had aided and abetted his increasingly stringent compulsions, for almost twenty-five years. He couldn't understand why she would leave now. 'You are like a bad pet,' she'd told him. 'You're like a human squirrel that never goes out, that just sits in the flat all day and all night, licking the same spot. I want to be able to open the windows. I want to walk into my own flat without having to put bags on my feet.' They'd had this conversation in the kitchen. The windows were taped shut and papered over, and both of them were wearing plastic bags over their socks. Martin was empty-handed; he had nothing he could use to counter Marijke's assertion. He was a human squirrel and he knew it. But who would take care of him if she left? 'You're a fifty-three-year-old PhD with a telephone and a computer. You'd be fine. Get Robert to take out the rubbish.' Two days later, Marijke was gone.

  She left him with two weeks' worth of frozen meals and a list of websites and telephone numbers. Sainsbury's delivered groceries and cleaning products; Marks & Spencer sent pants and socks. Robert posted his letters and carried the rubbish down to the dustbin.

  At the end of the day, it wasn't a bad way to live. There was no one to please but himself. He missed Marijke terribly, but he did not miss her reproving glares, her loud sighing, the way she rolled her eyes when he asked her to leave a room and come in again because she'd entered with the wrong foot first. Marijke wasn't there to frown when he ordered five thousand pairs of latex surgical gloves from a dodgy outfit on the Internet. While he was at it, he also bought a kit for measuring blood pressure, a gas mask and a desert-camouflage army-surplus jumpsuit which the site claimed could withstand chemical weapons.

  There were bargains to be had. From a different site he ordered four fifty-litre drums of bleach. This brought Robert to his door.

  'Martin, there's a bloke downstairs with an enormous amount of bleach. He says you ordered it, and it has to be signed for. Do you think it's safe
to have that much bleach around the house? The containers have all sorts of scary pictographs of hands with smoke coming off them, and warnings galore. Are you sure this is a good idea?'

  Martin thought it was a brilliant idea; he was always running out of bleach. To Robert he only said that he would be very careful, and to please put the bleach in the kitchen.

  The more Martin delved into the cyber world, the more he realised that there was absolutely nothing he couldn't have brought to his door, for a fee. Pizza, cigarettes, beer, free-range eggs, the Guardian, postage stamps, light bulbs, milk: all this and more appeared when required. He ordered books by the dozen from Amazon, and soon the unopened boxes piled up in the hall. He missed browsing in Stanfords, the map shop on Long Acre, and was overjoyed when he discovered their website. Maps began to arrive, along with guidebooks to places Martin had never visited. Inspired, he ordered everything Stanfords offered on Amsterdam, and covered his bedroom walls with maps of that city. He traced what he imagined might be Marijke's routes. He guessed, correctly (though he did not know it), that she lived in the Jordaan district. He assigned her a routine and mentally accompanied her as she rode her bike along canals and shopped for all the odd vegetables she loved that he wouldn't eat. Fennel, Jerusalem artichokes, rocket. He didn't consider any of it to be food. Martin lived on tea, toast, eggs, chops, potatoes, beer, curry, rice and pizza. He had a weakness for pudding. But in his imagination Marijke lingered in Amsterdam's outdoor markets, filling the basket of her bike with freesias and Brussels sprouts. He remembered walks he and Marijke had taken together there decades before, marvellous spring evenings when they were besotted with each other and Amsterdam seemed hushed and the sounds of boats and seagulls bounced off the seventeenth-century canal houses as though they were recordings being played back from the past. Martin would stand in his bedroom with the tip of his index finger pressed to the map over the location of the radio station where Marijke now worked. He would close his eyes, repeat her name silently, moving his lips, one hundred times. He did this to prevent himself from calling her. Often it sufficed. Other times he had to call. She never answered. He imagined her flipping open her mobile, frowning at his number, flipping it closed.

  Martin's desk was an island of normality in the wreck of his flat. He had succeeded in keeping his work space compulsion-free; if an obsession began to trouble him at his desk he would get up and take it to some other part of the flat to deal with it. Aside from cleaning rituals at the beginning and end of each work session, Martin had maintained his desk as a peaceful oasis. His computer had been for work only; email had been for corresponding with editors and proofreaders. In addition to setting his crossword puzzles, Martin also translated various obscure and ancient languages into various modern ones. He belonged to one online forum that existed to allow scholars worldwide to debate the merits of various texts and to amuse each other by ridiculing the work of translators who didn't belong to the forum.

  But now the Internet began to interfere with his cherished desk-isle, and he found himself monitoring eBay auctions of aquarium filtering machines and checking Amazon every ten minutes or so to see how his crossword books were selling. They always had depressing numbers like 673,082 or 822,457. Once his latest had made it up to 9,326. It had given him a happy afternoon, until he logged on before going to bed and found it at 787,333.

  Martin discovered that while he could find Young Girls Hot to Meet You!!!, Big Busted!?! S*xy Moms and a plethora of other opportunities to satisfy his lust and other people's avarice, he could not find Marijke on the Web. He Googled her repeatedly, but she was one of the rare, delicate creatures who managed to exist completely in the actual world. She had never authored a paper or won a prize; she had kept her phone number unlisted and didn't partake in any chat rooms or listservs. He thought she must have email at work, but she wasn't listed in the radio station's directory. As far as the Internet was concerned, Marijke didn't exist.

  As the days went by, Martin began to wonder if there had ever been a woman named Marijke who lived with him and kissed him and read him Dutch poems about the beginning of spring. Months disappeared, and Martin worked on his crosswords and translations, washed his hands until they bled, counted, checked, admonished himself for washing and counting and checking. He microwaved a monotonous array of frozen foods, ate at the kitchen table while reading. He did his laundry, and the clothes got thinner from too much bleach. He could hear the weather sometimes; rain and sleet, rare thunder, wind. He sometimes wondered what would happen if he stopped all the clocks. The cyber world ran outside of time, and Martin thought that he might cycle around the clock untethered. The idea made him depressed. Without Marijke he was only an email address.

  Martin lay in their bed each night imagining Marijke in her bed. Over the years she had become a little plump, and he loved her roundness, he loved the warmth and heft and curve of her under the covers. She snored sometimes, softly, and Martin listened in the dark until he could almost hear her small snores drifting through her Amsterdam bedroom. He would say her name over and over until it devolved into meaningless sounds - mah REI kuh, mah REI kuh - it became an entry in a dictionary of loneliness. He thought of her alone in her bed. He never allowed himself to wonder if Marijke might have found someone else. He could not bear to even frame the question in his mind. Only when he had imagined her quite completely, the folds of her face against the pillow, the hump of her haunch under the blankets; only then could Martin let himself sleep. He often woke to find that he had been crying.

  As each night passed he found it more difficult to evoke Marijke precisely. He panicked and pinned up dozens of photographs of her all over the flat. Somehow this only made things worse. His actual memories began to be replaced by the images; his wife, a whole human being, was turning into a collection of dyes on small white rectangles of paper. Even the photographs were not as intensely colourful as they had once been, he could see that. Washing them didn't help. Marijke was bleaching out of his memory. The harder he tried to keep her the faster she seemed to vanish.

  NIGHT IN HIGHGATE CEMETERY

  ROBERT SAT AT his desk with the lights off, watching through the front windows as Vautravers' tangled front garden disappeared in the dusk. It was June, and the light seemed to hang there, as though the garden had fallen out of time and become an enormous image of itself. The moon rose, almost full. He got up and shook himself, gathered his night scope and a torch and walked through his flat to the back door. He slipped down the steps quietly; Martin worried about intruders. Robert avoided the gravel path through the back garden, instead squishing across the mossy earth to the green door in the garden wall. He unlocked it and passed through the wall into the cemetery.

  He was standing on asphalt, the roof of the Terrace Catacombs. There were steps at both ends of the catacombs; tonight he took the western steps and headed towards the Dickens Path. He didn't use the torch. It was dark under the thick canopy of leaves, but he had done this route in the dark many times.

  He liked Highgate Cemetery best at night. At night there were no visitors, no weeds to pull, no enquiries from journalists - there was only the cemetery itself, spread out in the moonlight like a soft grey hallucination, a stony wilderness of Victorian melancholy. Sometimes he wished he could stroll with Jessica along the dim paths, enjoying the evening noises, the animals that called out to each other in the distance and stilled as he passed. But he knew that Jessica was at home, asleep, and that she would certainly exile him from the cemetery if she knew about his night sojourns. He rationalised, telling himself that he was patrolling, protecting the cemetery from vandals and the self-described vampire-hunters who had plagued it in the 1970s and '80s.

  Robert did sometimes meet other people in the cemetery at night. Last summer, for a short while, there had been a railing missing in the spiked iron fence that ran along the south-western edge of the cemetery. It was during this period that Robert began to see children in the cemetery in the evenings.

&nb
sp; The first time, Robert was sitting in the midst of a cluster of graves from the 1920s. He had cleared a place for himself in the tall grass and was sitting very quietly, looking through his video camera with the night-vision scope on, hoping to videotape the family of foxes whose burrow was just twenty feet from where he sat. The sun had set behind the trees, and the sky was yellow above the silhouettes of the houses just beyond the fence. Robert heard a rustling sound and turned his camera in that direction. But instead of foxes, the viewfinder suddenly filled with the spectre of a child running towards him. Robert nearly dropped the camera. Another child appeared, chasing the first one; little girls in short dresses, running between the graves silently, breathing hard but running without calling out. They were almost upon him when a boy shouted, and they both turned and ran to the fence, squeezed through the gap, and were gone.

  Robert reported the broken railing to the office the next morning. The children continued to play in the cemetery in the evenings, and Robert occasionally observed them, wondering who they were and where they lived, wondering what they meant by the strange games they silently played among the graves. After a few weeks a man came and put the fence right again. Robert walked along the street that evening and felt a bit sad as he passed the three children gathered there with their hands on the railings, peering into the cemetery, not speaking.

  Robert's PhD thesis had begun as a work of history: he imagined the cemetery as a prism through which he could view Victorian society at its most sensationally, splendidly, irrationally excessive; in their conflation of hygienic reform and status-conscious innovation, the Victorians had created Highgate Cemetery as a theatre of mourning, a stage set of eternal repose. But as he did the research Robert was seduced by the personalities of the people buried in the cemetery, and his thesis began to veer into biography; he got sidetracked by anecdote, fell in love with the futility of elaborate preparations for an afterlife that seemed, at best, unlikely. He began to take the cemetery personally and lost all perspective.