Asylum Road Read online

  When I told the story of what happened after, I described the golden-hour heat and the view. Us seated on a balcony overlooking a small fishing port. A still pool shaded by umbrella pines. I didn’t say I thought he was about to break up with me.

  Anya, he said.

  The cicadas seemed to intensify. All at once their separate mating calls surged as one siren song. A rasping sound that rose from everything on earth. He took my phone from my hand and set it aside, began to speak of a fork in the road. Something rose in my throat, hard and tight, I put my hand to it and hid by pressing into him, feeling our separate heartbeats hammer away in mutual dread. He released himself, got up. I thought he was leaving me but then he knelt. He lifted his hands, offering me a box.

  The yellow diamond flared green and white. On my finger, I could see it even out of the corner of my eye – an aurora that followed me everywhere.

  It had been his grandmother’s. Now, he said, sounding unconvinced, it would be mine.

  We stayed to watch the light bleed out. Somewhere an insect beat relentlessly against a screen and the sky turned a pink so saccharine my teeth began to ache.

  I stopped sleeping. Luke’s sleep changed too, which I knew because I only slept intermittently by day beside the pool. At night I watched him. I told myself the cause of my insomnia was the heat and mosquito hordes. The mattress was too hard. I watched the retreating tail of the green repellent coil, the hours burning off.

  He’d look angry in his dreams. He’d twitch then make a startled noise and lurch upright, hot and damp – What? he’d shout, like I’d shoved him. What’re you doing to me?

  In the mornings he’d rise stealthily and go running. I’d pretend to be asleep.

  When he came back I’d be waiting. I’d watch him through one eye as he undressed. Waiting again while he took a shower, watching again while he dried off. His penis pale beside his darkening legs. It started to look sickly. If he caught me with my eyes open, I turned my gaze to the yellow diamond, turning it slowly and deliberately so that it would catch the light.

  I’d taken several books by Sybille Bedford with me on that holiday. Every place, person and meal she described sounded like a secret language of sophistication. I read them in the sun by the pool while Luke read his apocalypse books in the shade, their titles all in sans serif. I found myself wishing to be like her. Bedford. Hedonistic. Denying my own hunger for security.

  One of the books Luke read revived his idea of getting a communal smallholding and living off the land. I wondered why he’d suggested getting married if society would soon collapse but I didn’t ask out loud. Not just because Luke talked about environmental issues in increasingly technical terms, as if irritated his pet cause had grown popular, but because the subject of our engagement quickly felt too awkward to return to. When I thought about it I felt a peculiar foreboding. It was not the feeling I’d expected when I imagined this initiation into married life. Though we inhabited the same villa and had nothing else to talk about, we barely spoke of it again. Without the ring, I’d have convinced myself I’d imagined it.

  I reasoned that this was probably for the best. I did not want a white wedding or the associated rituals. Weddings seem like hubris and perhaps they invite disaster. But I wanted the institution of marriage. To change my surname to Luke’s and be shielded by it. Bedford had become Bedford by one of those strategic marriages that happened between Jews and gays in the 1930s.

  Most people we knew were married by then. Christopher said it was reactionary. Luke and I owed our first meeting to the wedding of our only mutual friends, and since then I’d paid attention to ring-fingers, to the self-confidence of these women, like expensive cats that had all been microchipped. My ringless finger marked me as a stray among them. Something pitiable and out of place, which made me want it more, not just for protection but as validation. By that summer, listening to tales of yet another engagement could produce strange reactions in me. I’d ask the newly affianced if she’d been uneasy, following her suspicious-acting partner out onto some remote cliff face like that. A rock to the head instead of the hand! Only I would laugh at this.

  I laughed louder just to cover Luke’s unnerving silence, but there was resentment I could barely hide. A cold part at the very centre of me, painful, as if my underwire had pierced my flesh. My smile would droop on one side. What’s wrong? he sometimes asked as we left the creamy folds of another marquee. You look like you’ve got Bell’s palsy. My feet would hurt from being bound in foolish shoes. I’d run a bath in yet another B&B, soap my arms and slide the razor, going carefully round each wrist.

  Now I had a ring of my own. This was what I’d wanted. This was where everything in my life had led. This rented villa in the South of France. This man beside this pool. Occasionally dozing or plunging into the freezing water. But the longing was still there. I stared at the ring to remind myself of my new status, and, fresh from a dive, the breeze cold on my skin, the sun warming it, the view beyond the trees could then suggest something infinite, some new place I now had access to.

  The last Bedford book I read was her travel essays. One describes her drive across the Italian border and then through Yugoslavia. She is driving slowly, in a sturdier car than her own, rented so as to be expendable, apprehensive not only regarding the roads but of entering a socialist federalist republic where their idea of freedom is not the same as ours. Where ‘communism is the price for peace’. She describes the road to Split along the Dalmatian coast – the mountains, the green of the sea, the mist like a bloom on a peach – as the most wonderful drive she had ever experienced.

  When we returned to London, Big Ben had been stopped, and scaffolding now obscured the clock tower alongside parts of the Houses of Parliament. When I pointed this out as we drove past, Luke said that given the current situation the symbolism was too crude to mention, as if this was what I’d said.

  We dropped the car at home then went straight out again to an Italian restaurant where his friends congratulated us. We had them back to the flat and the toasts continued with wine Luke had brought from France. The women inspected the diamond as if for flaws. My drooping smile returned. Now it was my turn for Mason jars. For personalised vows like annual reviews – helping someone live their values.

  I went to bed long after him, having cleaned the kitchen. He had put a crime podcast on and fallen asleep but I lay there listening to it.

  The following morning, the sticky remains of a bird could be seen when I stood at the kitchen sink washing the wine glasses that were too large to go in the machine. I’d bought them for his birthday. A stupid purchase I could not afford. It seemed too high for a cat to reach the slate roof which jutted out from the back wall, so how, I wondered, had it got there?

  He came in as I was drying them and told me his parents had invited us to Cornwall. He’d go that afternoon and make the most of the holiday he still had left to take, I could join them on the weekend.

  They had known what Luke was planning to do in France. His mother had provided the ring. It was unclear what remained to be discussed privately between them, but I agreed to stay behind.

  September was ending but the temperature reached a sinister twenty-nine degrees. Every day was meant to cede to storms. I waited for rain to wash the tiles of the bird remains. The city heat made my insomnia worse. Finally I gave in and bought an expensive fan. Once I’d carried it home the heatwave ended – and it rained non-stop for days.

  The noise of the downpour helped me sleep, and in sleep it also entered my dreams. The sea levels had risen so that half of the British Isles were flooded. Luke directed me by text to meet him at a safe place but I had to sort out something first with my family. Once this was done, I could no longer find the message with Luke’s instructions, and the water meant I could no longer find my way back to the flat as all landmarks had been submerged.

  When I woke I texted Luke to tell him, even though he has no interest in these things. His reply came slowly but was comforti
ng:

  I’m sorry. It’s hard to get back to places in dreams.

  On Friday I walked most of the way in the rain to the station, relishing the new smell of the earth.

  I meant to work on the train but spent the hours watching the landscape change. I’d requested forward-facing with a table but was given a rearward seat. This happened every time I took the train to Penzance. I suppose they rarely know which way carriages will be facing when they allocate seats, but somehow it felt personal.

  I could have switched – there were empty forward-facing seats – but I hated doing this. I couldn’t stand the tension when the train arrived at each station and new passengers got on, their eyes boring into me as they moved along the aisle. And I couldn’t bear the shame of being told to move if I’d taken a place that did not belong to me.

  This paranoia was most acute on the way to see his parents, perhaps because of everything I knew from Luke about the native Cornish view of outsiders, or ‘emmets’ as he called them. His own mother had moved there as a child but made up for it with Cornish nationalism and loud suspicion of second-homers, which her own parents had once been.

  The journey to Mousehole was by then familiar. There were stretches of scenery I knew to look out for. I liked the thunk thunk of the doors and the whistle each time we pulled away, ever closer until I could recite the stations. They have good place names in that part of the world, easy to romanticise. Like in Scotland, they get wilder as you approach extremity. I liked to imagine the submarine cables emerging onto the rocks at Porthcurno, connecting this island to the world. It made my skin prick – something about the inevitability of the tracks, taking me as far as they could before land fell into sea.

  The man sitting opposite, where I’d wanted to sit, wore a Help for Heroes hoodie, unzipped to reveal an England football shirt. I glanced under the table to see a hybrid of hiking boots and trainers, a gold signet ring, a gold wedding band on the other hand resting on his thigh, a silver dog-tag-style bracelet hanging from his sleeve, a red poppy keychain fastened to his rucksack. He had the shining, ruddy skin of a younger man, his grey hair shorn in a military style. I looked into his eyes for a moment – large and black with no discernible irises. He reached down into his bag, pulling out the same flask Luke had, drinking from it then folding his arms, staring directly back at me.

  I wondered now if I had the wrong seat after all. No. I knew I was being paranoid again. I switched my gaze to the window. A wide brown expanse slanted with boats at low tide. The view for that part of the journey is how I imagine Doggerland.

  Occasionally I caught the eye of the woman at the opposite table, which she shared with two children and a man. I guessed from the proximity of their legs that they were her children and he was her husband, but in the five hours until they alighted at St Austell, I never saw one of them look up from their screen. She was conspicuous for not having anything to occupy her attention and her pale skin seemed to be lit by a different source, belonging neither to the train nor any of the worlds in which her family were separately engrossed.

  When our gaze met at Dawlish as the train grazed the sea, I sensed something strange in my vision. The speed of the train seemed to accelerate, dizzyingly, like we might reach the horizon. Looking at her, it was as if either she or I weren’t really there but regarding the other from another point in time.

  Later, as I stood between carriages in preparation for my stop – the last – I remember thinking: I’ll be alright if he breaks this off because I’ll still have the PhD to finish. I’ll crawl deeper into that black hole. The more dependable institution. The hammering in my heart again, the war drum starting up.

  *

  He was waiting beyond the railings. He wore an unfamiliar coat. I didn’t recognise him until he got out and signalled from the door of his dad’s car. The sticker in the window – Kernow, with the white cross on black. Even then I saw him as a stranger. This was a phenomenon I recognised when we spent time apart, but the physical attraction now took me by surprise.

  His mother often said Luke had been a late bloomer. He’d been substantial as a child. Durable, like the white goods that come with five-year guarantees. You could see the evolution in her framed photographs – which were everywhere – how he’d whittled into his present form, head separating out from neck. Lately his newfound fanaticism for running had made him sinewy.

  I dropped my bag and held out my arms to what was left of him. The yellow diamond flared. Luke kissed the top of my head and pressed me into the thick, fan-shaped muscle of his chest. I reached inside the strange oilskin then withdrew, holding him at arm’s length. He had the beginnings of a beard.

  Hello . . . ? I touched his face and then the coat.

  It’s Dad’s.

  I felt him take in my appearance now, worrying I’d applied too much foundation. He hated make-up, and then when he commented on it, I’d feel the self-conscious urge to wear more.

  I felt nervous, I said, on the way here.

  Me too.

  Driving down or coming to pick me up?

  He took my bag but did not answer.

  How are they?

  Fine.

  Listing Luke’s good traits, filial duty went near the top, but I’d never felt closer to him than during the previous summer, when he and his parents had fallen out. They had said it would be suicide staying in Europe, while Luke thought that word would be more apt if we left. Sorry, he said after, I only meant –

  I assured him I didn’t mind. Being taken into his confidence, listening to him rage behind their back, had produced a mirage of married life which lasted the duration of the rift. From the referendum until his mother called to check we were still alive when concrete barriers were installed on London’s major bridges.

  All arguments about sovereignty were suspended after those attacks. They asked if he wanted to move back. Now he minimised their estrangement, and seemed to resent me for what I remembered. I couldn’t understand what had gone on between them, he insisted.

  I’m sure his parents thought that I had been the cause of it. The cosmopolitanism I’d tried so hard to cultivate did not succeed at charming them. We had a row about it, maybe the closest Luke and I ever got to a real fight. He characterised his parents’ aversion to the bloc with ever more left-wing arguments, which I could not dispute although it was maddening. If I ever mentioned the conspiracy theories she bought into now, he leapt to her defence. If her trust in institutions was disintegrating, he said, it was even more important to hold her close. I knew that this was his way of reconciling his parents with his own world view. It was commendable, in a way, how he, a scientist, modified these facts out of loyalty. He’d been doing this ever since he went to university it seemed. Despite what Luke did for a job, his mother did not believe the world was warming, and her resistance had only grown alongside her son’s expertise. I’d wondered if it was a reaction to it, as if she had to compete with science, but actually it had started long before. She had refused all vaccinations for him growing up. The way she’d told me this, proprietorially, made it clear his body would never belong to me.

  I climbed onto the passenger seat, held up my newspaper, its front page still on fire:

  NEW DEATH TRAPS FOUND

  Good to get out, I said.

  He glanced at the photograph.

  Of the city, I mean.

  OK, how are you?

  I realised my error – talking about Cornwall as an escape irritated him.

  Fine.

  He claimed to have poor reception when he went home. He called it home though he also used that word for our flat. His flat. The flat his parents bought. Whenever he went to Mousehole, I expected minimal contact, so that when we were reunited, there was usually a period of adjustment, of having to make small talk as strangers might. Luke inscrutable, me eager and puppyish, sniffing out each interstice.

  This separateness could last for hours unless we had news to tell. I thought back over the past week. I’d spe
nt it eating leftover chicken pho, digging through fat which had solidified a greenish grey, leaving the flat only for small intervals of sun or to work in air-conditioned cafes or the British Library, alone. I’d achieved nothing. Several versions of a diagram, the tensile limits of my cables.

  When Luke was away I could turn feral on my own. I tried to think of something to tell him as he edged out of the station, but as I opened my mouth he pressed resume. The timbre of the podcaster familiar.

  I’ve done a lot of driving, he said noticing my look. It’s different when I’m alone.

  OK, can you fill me in?

  You’ll catch up.

  I was sensitive to that tone. I inferred from the tightness in it, like a wire stretched from the wall, that he’d reached his conversational limit during the week and had taken refuge in the solitude of the car before I’d broken it.

  I kept my eyes out the window, on the stream of moss-covered roofs, drystone walls, dark slate. One of the hosts thought the murderer was not a monster until society had made him one, the other took a more ‘Hobbesian’ view.

  Outside the town, the trees on either side of the road interlaced their branches to make tunnels. The roads became narrow lanes with fields either side of tall hedgerows. Then something one host said made me open my mouth without thinking.

  Any infestations I should know about?

  He was silent long enough to unnerve me.

  Not in the house.

  The first time I’d visited, a swarm of bees had exploded from the attic and the bluebell patch his mother cultivated was under threat from badgers – leaving me with serum sickness and the confused impression that badgers went out at night to gather bluebells. I heard Luke refer to me, upstairs, as the convalescent. I wasn’t listening – I’d been afraid of drifting off in case my mouth fell open. I was terrorised by small creatures. When I caught something scaling the wall, I left it dashed there as a warning until Luke had said there’d be other things that came now because they were attracted.