The First Cut

Kirsten read over the description; it was certainly tinged with eroticism.

“Am I right?” Sarah asked, pouring more wine. “Don’t you get the feeling that Hardy got some kind of kinky sexual pleasure from watching the woman get snuffed?” She put a hand to her mouth quickly. “Oh. I’m sorry, love. I…I put my foot in it. Must be the wine going to my head. I mean, I wasn’t thinking. I didn’t mean to…you know.”

Kirsten waved her hand. “It’s all right. I’d rather you say what you like than walk around handling me with kid gloves. I can take it. And anyway, you’re right, it is sexual.”

“Yes. And what’s more, did you notice how he turns her into some sort of convenient image for a poem. As if her life was only important because he got a charge from watching her get hanged. She wasn’t even a person, an individual, to him.”

“I wonder what she was like,” Kirsten said abstractedly.

“We’ll never know, will we?”

“I suppose not. But it’s not as odd as all that, is it? The way Hardy uses her, I mean. We all tend to see other people as bit players in our own dramas, don’t we? I mean we’re all self-centered.”

“I don’t think so. Not to that extent.”

“Maybe not. But you might be surprised.” She held her glass out and Sarah emptied the bottle. Kirsten was begi

Sarah shook the wine bottle, gri

Kirsten shrugged. “Fine.”

Sarah turned on the cassette player and disappeared behind the curtain into the kitchen. She must have been playing the tape earlier because one song was just fading out, and then “Simple Twist of Fate” began to play. It was the second track on Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks, Kirsten remembered, and it used to be one of her favorites; now, as she listened to Dylan’s hoarse, plaintive voice while Sarah was busy opening the second bottle, she realized that the strange lyrics didn’t mean what she used to think they did. Nothing did anymore.

Sarah returned with a larger bottle, lifting it up with a flourish. “Da-da! More your cheaper kind of plonk, really, but I’m sure at this stage it’ll do.”

Kirsten smiled. “Oh, it’ll do fine.”

“What did you mean,” Sarah asked when she had filled the glasses and sat down, “when you said I’d be surprised? What would I be surprised by?”

Kirsten frowned. “I was thinking of the man who attacked me,” she said. “I wasn’t a person, an individual, to him, was I? I was just a convenient symbol of what he hated or feared.”

“Would it have made any difference?”

“I don’t know. Would it have made any difference if it had been someone I knew? I can think of one way it would have: I’d know who it was.”

“And?”

“I’d bloody well kill him.” Kirsten lifted her glass of wine too quickly and spilled some down the front of her shirt. She patted herself on the chest. “Doesn’t matter,” she said. “It’ll dry.”

“An eye for an eye?”

“Something like that.”

Sarah shook her head slowly.

“I’m not crazy, you know,” Kirsten went on. “I mean it. Oh, there’ve been times…Sometimes I think it’s some sort of contagious disease he gave me, like AIDS, only in the mind. Or like vampirism. Can you imagine all those ripped-up women coming back from the grave to prey on men? Of course, I didn’t die, but maybe a part of me did. Maybe I have a little bit of the undead in me.”

“That’s cuckoo talk, Kirstie. Or drunk talk. You’re not going to convince me you’re turning into some sort of vampire version of Joan of Arc.”

Kirsten looked hard at her and felt the focus blurring. My god, she thought, I’m losing it. I almost told her. She laughed and reached for a cigarette. “You’re right,” she said. “I’m not. It’s all academic anyway, isn’t it?”

“Thank god for that,” Sarah said. The music stopped and she got up and turned over the tape.

As the two of them chatted, Kirsten glanced out now and then at the windows of the bedsits and flats over the street, just as she had in years past. At some point, she noticed “Shelter from the Storm,” another of her favorites, was playing, and her eyes burned with tears. She held them back.

Around midnight, Kirsten began to yawn in the middle of one of Sarah’s stories about a retired brigadier-general who had strayed into Harridan by mistake.

“Boring you, am I?” Sarah asked.

“No. I’m just tired, that’s all. It must be the wine and the travel. How about sleeping arrangements?”

Sarah yawned too. “Look, now you’ve got me at it. How about I take the chair and you have the bed?”

“Oh no, I couldn’t do that.”

“It is your room, after all. I’ve just been caretaking.”

“It was my room. No, I’ll put a couple of cushions on the floor and sleep there.”

“But that’s stupid. You’ll be so uncomfortable. Hell, it’s a three-quarter bed, let’s share it.”

Kirsten said nothing for a moment. The suggestion made her feel nervous and shy. She knew that Sarah wasn’t offering any kind of sexual invitation, but the thought of her own patched-up body next to Sarah’s smooth, whole skin made her cheeks burn.

“I haven’t brought a nightie,” she said.

“Not to worry. I’ve got a spare pair of pajamas. Okay?”

“All right.” Kirsten was too tired to argue, and the idea of sleeping in what had once been her own bed was inviting. When she stood up, she felt herself sway a little. She really had drunk too much.

They prepared themselves for bed and drew the curtains. Kirsten watched Sarah pull her T-shirt over her head and struggle with her tight jeans, then stand there naked and unselfconsciously brush her blond hair in front of the mirror. Her breasts bounced lightly with the motion of her arm, and below her flat stomach, the spun-gold hair between her legs caught the light.

Kirsten undressed last, in the dark, so that Sarah couldn’t see her scars, and when she slipped between the crisp sheets, she found herself staying as close to the edge of the bed as possible to avoid any unconscious contact.

But she needn’t have worried. Sarah lay with her face turned to the wall below the window, and soon her breathing settled into a slow, regular pattern. Kirsten listened for a while, feeling slightly dizzy and nauseated and cursing herself for almost telling Sarah everything she knew, not to mention what she intended to do about it. Eventually, she drifted off to sleep and dreamed of Martha Browne, that unknown woman in black swinging back and forth at the end of a rope in the misty Dorchester rain over a hundred years ago.

The next day, Sarah went into the bookshop, and Kirsten spent the morning revisiting her old campus haunts: the coffee lounge where she had met friends between lectures, the library where she had worked so hard for the final exams. She even wandered into an empty lecture theater and imagined Professor Simpkins droning on about Milton ’s Areopagitica.

Though she had avoided it on her way over, taking the roads instead, Kirsten walked back through the park. As her feet followed the familiar tarmac path through the trees she felt nothing at all, but when she reached the lion, its head still spray-painted blue and the red graffiti still scrawled all over its body, her hands started shaking. Unable to stop herself, she walked over to the sculpture.

It was a little after twelve. Children played on the swings and seesaw nearby. The clack of bowls came from the green behind the low hedge, and one or two people sprawled out on the grass, listening to portable cassettes or reading. But Kirsten still felt extreme unease, as if she had somehow stumbled on a taboo place, an evil spot shu