The First Cut

46 Kirsten

Kirsten stared out of the window at the landscape beyond her reflection. The rounded green hills of the Cotswolds soon gave way to the fertile Vale of Evesham, where barley and wheat looked ready for harvest in the fields, and apples, pears and plums hung heavy on their trees in the hillside orchards.

Then came the built-up landscape of the Midlands: cooling towers, the sprawling monotony of council estates, allotments, greenhouses, a redbrick school, a football field with white goalposts. When the train crept into Birmingham and she could feel the huge city pressing in on all sides, she began to feel nervous. This was, after all, her longest journey in ages, and she was making it alone. For over a year she had been living in a soft, comfortable, familiar world, shuttling between the Georgian elegance of Bath and the bucolic indifference of Brierley Coombe.

Now it was gray and raining and she was in Birmingham, a big, rough city with slums, skinheads, race riots and all the rest. Luckily, she didn’t have to get off the train there. She hoped Sarah would be at the station to meet her when she arrived at her destination.

After a twenty-minute stop, the train pulled out and lumbered past twisting concrete overpasses into another built-up area: the derelict warehouses with rusty zigzag fire escapes, and the messy factory yards stacked high with crates and pallets that always seemed to back onto train tracks in cities. It ran alongside a busy commuter road, a dirty brown canal, and a dark brick embankment wall scrawled with graffiti. Next came a few green fields with grazing cows, and then the train settled into a steady, lulling clickety-click through Derbyshire into South Yorkshire, with its slag heaps and idle pit wheels, a landscape in which all the green seemed to have been smudged by an inky finger that was now ru

Kirsten closed her eyes and let the rhythm carry her. She would stay with Sarah a day or two perhaps, until she felt it was time to go. Despite what she had told her parents, she had not suggested that Sarah take time off work. Kirsten would say she was going to the Dales walking for a few days alone. If that sounded odd-after all, she had spent the last year in the countryside, much of the time alone-then it was too bad. But Sarah would take her word. It was surprising how eager people were to believe her about anything after what had happened to her.

The rain had stopped when Sarah met her at the station later that evening. They allowed themselves the luxury of a taxi to take them back to the bedsit. All the way, Sarah chatted about how glad she was that Kirsten had decided to come back, and how they would look for a flat together as soon as Kirsten had got her bearings again. Kirsten listened and made the right responses, glancing left and right out of the window like a nervous bird as familiar sights unfolded around her: the tall, white university tower, the terraces of sooty redbrick student housing, the park. Washed and glistening after the rain, it all took her breath away with its combination of familiarity and strangeness. For fifteen months it had been simply a landscape of the mind, a closed-off world in which certain things had happened and been filed away. Now that she was actually riding through it again in a taxi, she felt as if she had somehow drawn her surroundings from deep inside herself, from her imagination. She was no longer in the real world at all; she was in a painting, an imagined landscape.

It was getting dark outside when they arrived at the flat. Kirsten followed Sarah up the stairs, remembering with her body rather than in her mind how often she had made this journey before. Her feet remembered in their cells the cracked linoleum they trod, and her fingertip seemed to hold within it the memory of the light switch she pressed.

When she entered her room itself, she had that sensation, however mistaken, of being at a journey’s end. It was something she had felt so often before, arriving home after lectures or tiring exams. She remembered the occasional day spent ill in bed with a cold or a sore throat, when she would read and watch the shadows of the houses opposite slowly crawl up the far wall and over the ceiling until the room grew so dark that she had to put the reading lamp on.

She dropped her holdall in the corner and looked around. Some of her belongings were still in their original places: a few books and cassettes in the main room and mugs and jars in the little kitchen alcove. All Sarah had done was clear space for her own things. There was no problem with clothes, of course, as Kirsten had emptied the cupboard of most of hers, but Sarah had filled one cardboard box with some of Kirsten’s books and papers to make room for her own on the shelves and the desk.

“Well?” Sarah said, watching her. “Not changed much, has it?”

“No, it hasn’t. I’m surprised.”

“Does it upset you, being back here again?”

“No,” said Kirsten. “I don’t think so. I’m not sure. It’s just a very odd feeling, hard to explain.”

“Well, don’t worry about it. Just sit down for now. Do you want some tea? Or there’s wine. I got a bottle of plonk. Thought you might like that better than going out on the first night.”

“Yes, that’s great. I don’t much fancy going out. I’m a bit tired and shaky. But some wine would be nice.”

Sarah took the bottle from the small refrigerator and held it up. It was a pale gold color. “Aussie stuff,” she said. “A Chardo

“Yes, please.”

Sarah brought in the cheese with a selection of biscuits on a Tetley’s tray, liberated from the Ring O’Bells. They toasted the future and drank. Kirsten helped herself to some food, then picked up a book she noticed lying on the floor by the armchair. It was a thick biography of Thomas Hardy. “Is this what you’re reading right now?” she asked.

Sarah nodded. “I’m thinking about doing my Ph.D. in Victorian fiction, and you know how I love biographies. It seemed a pleasurable enough way of getting back into academic gear.”

“And is it? I mean, Hardy’s hardly a light, cheerful read, is he?”

Sarah laughed. “I don’t know about a pessimist, but he was certainly a bloody pervert.”

“How?” asked Kirsten. “I’ve only read Far from the Madding Crowd for that novel course in first year. I don’t even remember much about that except some soldier showing off his fancy swordplay. I suppose that was meant to be phallic?”

Sarah laughed. “Yes, but that’s not what I meant. All writers do that kind of symbolism thing to some extent, don’t they?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, for one thing,” Sarah went on, “do you know he used to like attending public executions when he was in his teens? Especially when women were being hanged.” She reached for the book and turned the pages slowly as she talked. “There was one in Dorchester and he told someone about it when he was much older…ah, here it is…1856. Martha Browne was the woman’s name, and she was hanged for murdering her husband. She caught him with another woman and they got into a fight. He attacked her with a whip and she stabbed him. Hanging her was the Victorians’ idea of justice. Anyway, Hardy went along and wrote about it.” She pushed the book under Kirsten’s nose. “Just look at that.”

Kirsten read: “What a fine figure she showed against the sky as she hung in the misty rain, and how the tight black silk gown set off her shape as she wheeled half round and back.”

“I mean, really,” Sarah went on, “the poor woman was swinging at the end of a bloody rope and Hardy makes out as if she was entering some kind of wet T-shirt contest. Would you credit it?”