3. Moon

***

When we looked up, it was there. The blind moon, hanging, a white silk blaze.

We had never walked so far before and time was irrelevant. Her skin was stone blue. The road was painted with silence. 

Alison. Could she hear her name in my head? 

Somewhere, his body was growing grey and the wolves were circling round his soul. Flowers faded. Slipping away.

She heard me.

She heard the bicycle wheels and the wash of light behind us, following, following.

“Let’s go back,” is what she said when her lips parted, and my eyes opened.

***

“You were talking in your sleep.”

Alison had shorn her hair with the scissors. A smart, clean black rim surrounded her prim face as she made tea. She’d shaved her eyebrows clean off. 

“You were saying things, over and over. I couldn’t quite hear them. Heard you say my name once.”

The teaspoon rattled in her cup.

“A car alarm went off some time this morning. Or a dog barking. I remember a dog barking, definitely. Yapping.”

She sat down, cradling the cup in her palms. 

“You shall have to look after my mother when I’ve gone. She’s going to only get worse when I’ve gone away. I hope you understand that.”

She looked half at my face, half through it and out the window. The ugly little curls of steam from her tea vanished just below her chin.

Her lips opened soundlessly for a moment. Her fingers clung on to the cup handle.

“Robert, why don’t you say something when I say something?”

Every word was strained to bursting; her face was bloodless as marble.I tried to open my throat.

“I have nothing to say.”

“You store everything up, cork it all up. That silence is poisoning you from the inside.”

“What the f**k do you want me to say, Alison? ‘Where have your eyebrows gone?’”

Alison’s head dropped so her stained, bulging eyelids nearly touched the rim of her cup. You could see where she’d made an unsteady attack on her hairline around the ears. She breathed heavily through her nose.

“Maybe we should start with the fact that our best friend died.”

“Your best friend died.”

“Our best friend died. Our best friend.”

She made a movement as if to stretch her arms out towards me, then faltered and drew herself further in. She lifted her face up painstakingly. Her eyes brushed over mine. 

I wanted to get out of the room. The large kitchen clock was leering at me. The first cars of the day were passing behind me. The first bicycles. 

“It’s...” Alison said. She didn’t go on from there.

Suddenly I was violently sick.

I grabbed the cold edges of the sink and was sick all morning.The reddish vomit reared up again and again. My eyes burned from the smell. Eventually Alison went upstairs. 

I did not see her again that day. I knew she was in the garden, though, taking apart every dead leaf and scattering the pieces.