A Letter of Mary - Laurie R. King [102]
"There is now a circle, one circle, and you can feel it now, one deep, quiet circle of now and then, and you can look into this circle because you are in it, and it is in you, this one circle, and you are on the bottom step, and that is as far as we can go now, and you are free to talk as you want and think as you want, and whenever you are here, you need feel only safe and sure of yourself, and nobody can touch you here; no one can ever ask you to do anything you don't want to. It's your step, Sarah, yours alone, and now you've found it, you can come back to it anytime you want, but just now, let's explore a bit, if you want to, and you can tell me all about the dinner you ate two weeks ago, on Tuesday night it was, you remember. It was a nice dinner, wasn't it, and if you want to tell me, I'd like to hear about it."
Her mouth made a kind of chewing motion two or three times, as if tasting the words, and then she spoke, her voice low and flat, slow at first, but quite clear.
"Tuesday night, we went to Matty's house for dinner. I wore my blue dress and we took a taxi because it isn't far and it was raining." She was launched, and she continued on in monotonous detail until I finally eased her out of Tuesday night into Wednesday morning, then the afternoon.
"And now it's Wednesday evening. You've come home from work, and Tommy's coming to pick you up at— what time did he say?"
"Half seven. We're going to a posh restaurant to celebrate our six-month anniversary, and there's a flaming pudding at the next table, so I order that, and Tommy orders champers." I let her go on again for some time before giving another touch to the reins of her narrative.
"And now it's later, and you're leaving the restaurant, and you're full of lovely food and happy with Tommy, and where do you go?" My voice was light and calm. O'Rourke, across the room, was beginning to tense up, but she was not; deep in the hypnotic state, she did not anticipate anything.
"We walk to the pub where we met, back in February, and we see some friends who got married in June and we go to their house and laugh and drink and Solly has some great new records from America and we dance and then the neighbours pound on the floor and we have to leave."
"And you set off walking and you're humming the music, aren't you? And you're still dancing along, and you love Tommy and the feel of your arm in his, and you cuddle a bit here and there because there's no one on the street, and in the light from the streetlamp Tommy sees a pot of red flowers up under somebody's window...."
"And he starts to climb up the drainpipe to get me one, and I say, 'Oh, Tommy, don't do that, silly boy. Stop it. There's somebody coming and she—' "
It came upon her as suddenly as it had that night, and she went rigid, her mouth and eyes staring wide, and I went down beside her and spoke forcibly (The sound of the voice with the German accent was deafening. Surely she couldn't hear me over it; surely O'Rourke would stand up and come over and demand to know who it was saying, "Mary, your clever eyes can remember—"), into her ear.
"Tommy can't see, Sarah, but you can; your clever eyes can remember— it's like something in a cinema house, isn't it, on the screen, but slowed down, no more real than that, a car on the screen, coming out of the darkness and hitting her and tumbling her around, and it drives around the corner and then that dirty-looking beggarman stands up and he moves and he does something. He does something; he bends down and he is doing something with his hands. What is he doing, Sarah?"
"He ... He ... stands up. He isn't old. Why did I think he was old? He stands up like a young man and he goes to the pillar-box and he has ... he has something in his hand. He has a pair of scissors in his hand, and he bends down, and then he ... he's winding yarn into a ball, and he picks up his briefcase that's lying on the street and he turns his back