Spares - Michael Marshall Smith [103]
The contradictory pulses of guilt and excitement, the feeling of a stranger’s lips on yours when you should be somewhere else: Somewhere in the gap between those two emotions, perhaps, was what I was looking for.
I never found it. Eventually Angela came along, and after that things were different. I slept around less, and when I did it was with a mean-spirited pragmatism. I loved Angela with all my heart, and part of the reason I was able to do that was that so much of Henna was in her. It was as if there was a version of my wife that I didn’t have to be married to, didn’t have to have a male-female relationship of any kind with, but could simply love. Angela wasn’t a flawed version of some imaginary woman; she was simply my perfect daughter. So much of the love we have for people depends on how they make us feel about ourselves, and Angela made me feel like I was worthy of loving. She would stand in front of me, looking up, and then suddenly just hurl herself upward as hard as she could, arms stretched out, trusting me to catch her. I’d fold her to my chest, and sometimes as I nuzzled her face I’d be aware of Henna in the background and be able to feel the tangible wave of her happiness and relief.
I would watch Henna and Angela together, and hear them talk, and during that period feel closer to happiness than any time before or since. I remember one afternoon when we all went walking, up on the Blue Ridge Parkway near Lexington, and Angela found a snail crawling over a rock. “Look,” she said, and Henna looked, and told her how snails carried their houses on their backs. Angela was entranced, and I knew for sure that was one story which she would never forget for the rest of her life, which she would tell her own daughter when the time came.
For a moment I was truly there with them in the sunshine, in the real world rather than my own mind. Maybe things should have changed for me then, and I could have found something approaching a life. All that really stood in the way was my unwillingness to commit myself. Perhaps I could have learned how.
Two things intervened to stop it from being so, and the first of these was Fhee.
I was sitting in a bar in the Portal one evening when Angela was four, trawling for information on a sex-related homicide involving someone on 138. The night was young, and I was only slightly drunk, when I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned round to see someone who looked familiar.
The woman grinned, and I knew: It was an older version of Fhee. For a moment I was speechless, and then I forgot all about the questions I’d been asking the dopeheads at the bar.
I forgot about Henna, Angela, the present, everything. For three hours Fhee and I sat, knees and hands touching, competing with each other to remember times now ten years past; and while we spoke we knew they were gone, but it didn’t feel as if that made any difference. I felt as if years were being stripped away, as if acid was being poured down drains and pipes in my head which had been blocked for years.
At ten o’clock we bought a couple of bottles to go and took off in my car, driving randomly through the wilds until we came by chance upon Lake Ratcliffe. We parked the car by the shore and walked along the banks still talking nonstop, until we saw a small island and paddled to it through the freezing water. We explored the island, clambering clumsily over rocks in the dark, finding things to look at and enjoy and point out to each other as we had done many years ago.
When we’d worked all the way round we made our way up to the higher ground, and found a hollow, an enclave, a little way down from the top of the island shielded on two sides by the walls of rock. We sat and smoked and drank from our bottles of wine, talking of the people we’d known, the times we had seen, the way the moon glinted on the crests of the water.
And then we were lying, still talking, but with her head on my chest and my arm loosely around her. The inevitable came slowly and unexpectedly, and we watched it arrive, until our lips started to brush together and