The Order Of Things

I was the last person to see her. The police allowed me to carry away some of her belongings in the hope I would reveal something of interest. So far they had nothing.

“We will talk soon.” The detective said, taking me in, as I gathered the tangle of her notebooks cast across his desk. Her papers lay around the room as though they had exploded in his hands. 

I took the chance to get away to head up to the cabin, gripping the steering wheel, my knuckles pale, glowing against the dark winding road, as though the hands of another man. The shadows of the pines towering above shifting as though conspiring to bring me into a new sinister night.

The seat beside me was stacked with Justine's books. She reclined in the passenger chair every Sunday, as we climbed the mountain in the car. As we made the journey she whispered to me, as though I were part of a dream she was enacting in her mind, her delicate hands tuning the radio into static, peeling us fruit from a paper bag. 

“You’re here at last” she’d said, as though she’d summoned me here from another realm and forgotten my name. 

Every week we drove to the cabin. She let me trace the eternity of her, remembering facts like an animal. I had planned to beg her to marry me, to put a stop to the feeling of the constant ache.

I knew the place I would press on her white wrist, the dust of the Persian rug clinging to my clothes as I knelt before her. 

Seven people telephoned to say she was gone.

Soon there was no one new left who could hurt me. The register of their voice changed as they delivered the news of her death as their words became all too small and precise. Why, why was nothing else but death explained so simply, and why did I have to be told, and told again? 

Pressing against the accelerator I forced the car deeper into the unforgiving forest. The cabin in its perpetual state of disrepair emerged through the trees. 

Stepping out of the car I breathed in the heady scent of damp earth and burnt rubber. The past collided with the present with electric tension, my mind vibrating back and forth between the haunting beauty of her remembered presence and the black grip of loneliness of her absence before me. 

I stood on the threshold, on the edge of making the first evening at the house without her, cursing the thicket of memory, clutching her books to my chest.

Halting at the entrance way I took it all in, the swirling dust in the dim light, the dated elegance of the Princess of Wales writing desk, a replica antique, identical to one at the palace, the gold handles of the drawers carved into lions. The picture of Justine in the white dress, as she walked along the cliff edge, hung framed above the piano. 

We made the drive up to the cabin every week. 

She undressed and lay down to sleep in the vast unmade bed, while I unpacked and opened the shutters. It was as though she saved up sleep for those days with me. I knew she suffered terribly from sleeplessness when she was without me, roaming the halls with glasses of ice. 

I would put the dinner on and when the light began to fade I played a few bars of whatever music was at the piano. She stirred and descended the stairs, dwarfed by my dressing gown and slippers, half asleep and ravenously hungry. 

I whispered her name and she smiled and turned her back to me so I could burry my face in the smell of her hair as I kissed the back of her neck. 

Left alone she found it difficult, her lips moved in silent conversations with dead relatives, she stared deeply at the wall. 

She examined the skin of my hands for signs - of what I do not know - moving her fingerprint over my own as though the detail of the texture would reveal some new truth. 

But the last time I had seen her things were different. 

“Do you mean to kill me Piers, to drive me to it? I must know the truth.” She pulled at my sleeve, black tears running down her pale face. 

“What? of course not!” I said, trying to tear my arm from her but her body froze and she put her finger to her lips and said,

“Shhh. They mustn’t hear us. They could come anytime, they promised they would.” She clutched my arm, her eyes wide, startled, searching past the window into the black charge of the forest beyond. 

Her dreams affected her waking days, the embers never fully dying out in the the colder light of day. 

Her lips trembled as she tried to explain herself. She wanted me to ease the illness of her mind, before she gradually began to forget it was madness which consumed her. 

I tried to provoke her out of it by denying anything was wrong. But she wrung the edge of my jacket and clawed at my shirt, trying to warn me by snatching at my clothes in fistfuls, crying and swearing that I didn’t understand the danger.

I clutched the rail, sickened by guilt. 

I brought my things in from the car and poured a drink. Sinking down into the chair I smoothed my hand against the silk brocade of the great tapestry above. The trophies she had won at school for spelling, and archery, and experiments in chemistry lined up above the doorframe. Her lipstick marked the white tip of cigarette in a cold ashtray, the sight of it gripped my heart. I spread a page of her diary out against the cold leather upholstery. 

She listed the factors of control, sketching out symbols she took to be good omens and then ones she began to think of as bad. The flight patterns of birds, the movement of raindrops down a pane of glass, the entrance of one familiar person to her life, repeated two days later, the appearance of a coffee cup, one light switched on before another, the patterns of emergent flower buds, the frequency of thunder.

There were lists and lists of potential meanings and their connections, symbols and signs, swimming with significance, and then flooded with meaning, like a drowned village. 

I turned to the last page. I shall decide the meaning of my world and begin again. May God forgive me. And Piers. He speaks to me in ways I thought were not possible. I had once hoped we would be married and I would find peace living out a conventional life.

One only ever sees the image of the world as it is alive. 

I couldn’t be convinced of her death. There was no art which colonises the world of death. 

Her words were not ones tuned to the ear of logic. To talk with Justine was as though speaking with some forgotten mystic poet. The flowers she arranged in the vase were tinged with the anticipation of madness, as though the things she touched expected to be put in to some secret order understood, in their complex sequence, by she alone.

The whole house was arranged that way, her comb in the bottom drawer of the dresser, next to tomorrow’s sweater, Twenty Love Poems and A Song of Despair, half a candle, a brown stone from the garden, hair from my last haircut, some writing in the hand of a child, five burnt matches held together with a rubber band, a glass bottle of l'art & la matièrea, a crushed paper cup. 

A bright flash of light pierced the window blinding me for an instant. A mirror hung from the trees in the garden twisted in the wind. The sun flashed its daggers. She had hung up a great gilt frames mirror amongst the low slung branches of the pines. Sea glass in colours of ruby and emerald hung from lengths of cotton tangled with broken strings of beads. Justine moved below them in some trance-like dance, gathering petals from the white flowers of the garden and scattering rice on the ground. 

She had never developed the inhibitions of adulthood, eating the fruit on the grass which rolled from the tree with the impulsivity of a child, leaving a neat line of fruit seeds drying in the sun, leaving books out for the rain, oak leaves pressed between their pages. 

I had intended to live out the rest of my story with her at the crumbling cabin, to barricade ourselves in and return from the world, nurturing the relationship she had with the land and the house.

I wanted to understand how she was trying to understand the earth, in the ways I did not know. I needed to be mystified by her, to be made curious of the world. 

Moving from the brightness of the sun to the writing desk I placed my head against the whorls of the walnut wood, the pattern summated with the darkness beyond vision.

Her missing place overturned reality. Her position in my mind’s eye would always be just beyond and I would never be able to conjure her forth without moving through her absence as a wall of pain. 

I found her scent by breathing in the wood of the desk. A small noise came from upstairs, a natural every day sound, the opening of a door. 

Savouring the moments with my face pressed to the desk, wondering how I would find her.

A cool evening light crept into the room. A glass of ice melted on the window sill.

The sounds upstairs moved across the floor. A light rain began outside.

The heady scent of flowers drifted in, the earth rose up, life opened. The world began to take up its place.