Aria Remains
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

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‘Hello, Ms Cova. My name is Doctor Cummings. It’s very nice to meet you. Now, please, come in, take a seat and make yourself comfortable.’

Aria eyed Doctor Cummings warily. A man of, she calculated, somewhere in his early sixties, the better part of himself already exchanged for middle aged acquiescence and pecuniary gain, with receding grey hair and a kind, ruddy face. He struck her as being pleasant enough but, as she shook his hand and sat upon a deep, comfortable sofa that was probably as expensive as her bed, computer and television combined, she couldn’t help wondering again why he had wanted to see her so quickly. It had only been a couple of days since Ruby had made her an appointment with her own doctor, who had rather speedily arranged this appointment.

With a psychiatrist.

A headshrinker.

I must be, she had already concluded as she lay awake the night before, watching the light from passing cars stretch and shorten across her bedroom ceiling, a hopeless case, someone they wanted to get into the system as quickly as they could before any real and permanent damage was done, locking the door behind her, the orderlies sighing with relief as they arranged for the key to be transported by aeroplane over the Mariana Trench, tossed into it at its deepest point. Or perhaps, she thought, they want to study me, probably want to use me as a case study for junior quackers the world over. I am a guinea pig, the first of my kind to have such frighteningly insurmountable mental health issues. They’ll probably name a syndrome after me. I’ll be a condition.

‘Now then,’ Doctor Cummings said with a practiced smile, the kind of smirk Aria interpreted as that which predators have neither reason nor compulsion to hide when they come across much weaker and vulnerable prey. He eased himself into a matching armchair opposite the sofa, groaned slightly at the effort and began flicking over the sheets of paper attached to his clipboard. ‘Doctor Havers told me a brief bit about what’s been happening with you but, if you don’t mind, I’d be very grateful if you could tell me the story again, right from the beginning.’

He smiled again, while Aria wondered just what he meant by ‘story’. Regardless, she conceded that since she was here she may as well tell him what he wanted to hear, even if she wavered at its likely efficacy and so, speaking slowly and carefully, she told him about everything that had happened over the preceding few weeks. As she spoke he nodded intermittently, making notes, smiling and crossing and uncrossing his legs. When she had finished talking, when she had told him of the final, dreadful thing that had happened, the manifestation of her best friend lying dead on her living room floor, beaten and bloodied, and had then been visited by the spectres of the night, he drew a flamboyant line across the sheet of paper with a dull scratching sound and cleared his throat, which sounded almost the same.

‘It does, indeed, sound as though you have been having a very trying time of it lately,’ he said, his voice calm, soft, as though he was asking if she might like sugar in her coffee. ‘Now, first of all, I think we should concentrate on the dreams you have been experiencing, since we can do something about that quite quickly.’

Aria nodded. Without being quite sure why, she suddenly felt as though she had done something wrong, that she was in the headmaster’s office and should be on her very best behaviour. Although undecided how fruitful this visit would prove to be, she knew she needed help and was very conscious of not wanting to disappoint Ruby.

‘In the first instance,’ he went on, ‘we need to examine the link between the nightmares you are having and the quality of your sleep, looking at the psychotic, affective and cognitive symptoms, and that requires us to conduct an assessment of those nightmares, of your sleep quality and how great the effects of your post-traumatic stress have been upon you and, as a consequence, your social functioning and working memory. It is generally safe to say - and I am not, as yet, saying this absolutely applies to you - but the more distressing the nightmare, the more we can say that they are positively associated with greater delusional severity, depression, anxiety, stress and difficulties with working memory.’

He paused, looking at Aria. She wanted to say, ’You lost me at ‘first instance’’, but instead offered, ‘I have always had problems with my memory.’

‘Ah,’ Doctor Cummings said. ‘And how would you describe these… problems? Would you say they are related to your long-term memory or short-term memory?’

‘Well, I think that it’s probably my long-term memory,’ she replied, haltingly. ‘I really struggle to remember things from years ago. Being at school seems a million years ago, and I really don’t remember anyone who was in my class. The other day this woman approached me, saying we had been at school together, but I had no recollection of her at all.’

‘Would you say,’ Doctor Cummings wondered, ‘that your memory of those years has worsened of late?’

Aria shifted in her seat. She wondered how much he knew about her early years and whether he thought, as she did, that they probably had a very big role to play in the way she could remember almost nothing until she was in her mid-teens.

‘Are you aware of my history?’ she asked, feeling nervous, not wanting to delve too deeply into it. ‘Do you know about me, about what’s happened in my life?’

‘I do,’ he said, turning back a few pages on his clipboard. ’You were, I believe, what they refer to these days as a foundling.’

‘I was,’ Aria said quietly. ’I always thought that was the reason why I can’t remember very much of that time, or of any time ’til I left school. Like I’ve been kind of blanking it out. Like there was trauma or something.’

Doctor Cummings nodded thoughtfully.

‘Perhaps, yes,’ he agreed and, after studying her for a moment, he asked, ‘Do you think now might be a good point for us to talk about your parents?’

‘My real parents?’

The doctor nodded again.

‘I mean, I don’t even think about my birth mother, I never really thought about her…’

She paused as he made a note on his clipboard.

‘So, um, no, I never think about her. She didn’t want me, for whatever reason, and so that’s fine.’

‘Have you ever thought she may not have been able to keep you, that it was circumstance dictating her actions, rather than a conscious decision that she made?’

Aria furrowed her brow, shrugged and said, ‘My parents, who I do think of as my real parents, they were just wonderful. I couldn’t have wanted for better, couldn’t have wanted anything more. You know, they named me Aria because they said as soon as they saw me I brought beautiful music into their lives. Isn’t that nice?’

Doctor Cummings smiled but said nothing.

‘Anyway, I think I was only a couple of months old when they took me on, so they’re all I ever knew.’

‘And then, of course,’ Doctor Cummings said, ‘they were killed. In a car crash, wasn’t it?’

Aria nodded.

‘And you were, how old, seventeen?’

‘Yes, seventeen,’ she replied, wondering absently why he was asking her these questions he clearly already knew the answers to but still, as she spoke, softening to his benign, empathetic expression, she began to feel that she wanted to open up to this man, this stranger in his expensive suit, with his shiny gold watch and sovereign ring, turned half around his little finger. ‘And now you’re going to ask how it made me feel, aren’t you? Well, I was absolutely devastated, of course.’

He smiled again. An understanding, encouraging kind of smile.

‘I think I was at the age where, even though I might not have initially grabbed onto how important it was, what an awful thing it was to have happened and what it would mean for me, I was also just becoming independent, was just thinking about moving out of home. I was at college, had interests of my own, my own things I wanted to do that didn’t include them, and so I had all these different feelings, different emotions I suppose you could say. That might have been right around the time that my memory become more clear, that I can recall the things that happened in my life just as most other people probably can.’

‘But you remember your parents when you were young?’ Doctor Cummings asked. ‘The memories from that part of your early life are still there?’

‘Kind of,’ Aria said, screwing up her face. ‘I remember flashes, like a particular afternoon when we’d be on holiday or something, sitting on the beach, or at a funfair, or a particular Bonfire Night, which I never really liked, by the way. Could never see the point of fireworks, wasting money on something that did nothing but scare the animals.’ She brought herself to a pause, unable to decide how much information was too much information, whether Doctor Cummings would be interested to know that she didn’t mind the sparklers.

‘There was the time when Santa went past outside on his sleigh,’ she decided would possibly be more interesting, ’one of those fund-raising things with loud Christmas music blaring out, you know. My dad quickly ran out of the room when I was watching Santa out the window, and he came back and said, ‘Oh, Aria, look, he’s left you a present’, and he gave me this little Tom and Jerry model thing, ‘cause I used to love Tom and Jerry when I was little. I remember that as though it were yesterday. But then there are a million other days, a million other little moments, probably just as great and wonderful as those, that are just gone.’

She looked down sadly.

‘Gone forever.’

‘You might replace,’ Doctor Cummings said, changing his position as he aimed for positivity, ‘that some of those moments you think of as being lost will return to you. They will all still be in there, in your memory. It’s just a matter of allowing them to show themselves, to make themselves accessible again.’

As Aria listened, the doctor explaining that it can be difficult for therapists to help these patients because they may not be able to remember the traumatic experiences that are the root cause of their symptoms but that, on the other hand, memories are usually stored in distributed brain networks including the cortex, and can be accessed to consciously remember an event, she began to drift away. Images started to form in her mind, vivid, prismatic scenes that appeared as real to her as the doctor sitting before her in his bright office that, regardless of the expensive furnishings and colourful paintings on the walls, still held onto its analeptic sterility. She did not notice him regarding her with a kind of professional, thrilled curiosity and making further notes on the paper attached to his clipboard, and she had no way to know he had written, ‘Defence - splitting / suppression / dissociation’.

Despite never having wanted to see any photographs of the scene of her parents’ crash, now she visualised the elements of the incident as she had heard them discussed between various authorities in its aftermath. Looming before her was the bent and broken car as it had landed in the water below the damaged bridge, her mother and father slumped across the front seats, shattered glass and splattered blood around the frame of the windscreen and on the bonnet of the Metro. It was the only car that she knew the name of, that she was able to recognise without assistance or by reading its name somewhere on the chassis. But, as the illusory version of herself moved closer to the wreckage, walking carefully so as not to allow too much of the river water to seep into her trainers, she saw that it wasn’t actually her mother at all, bloodied and insentient in the passenger seat, but another woman, a woman she did not recognise yet felt she knew. A woman with dark, almost black hair like her own and the same blue eyes, except hers were now now vacant, staring straight ahead, seeing nothing. Oddly she was wearing the same coat her mother used to own, a beige jacket with a faux-fur lining around the hood. Aria hadn’t thought about that jacket before, had forgotten that it had been her mother’s favourite but now, as though it had been just last week, she remembered running her fingers through the soft fur, listening to her mother as she explained why she never wore leather and why she had become a vegetarian.

‘I love animals,’ she had told her. ‘So why on earth would I want to eat them, have them suffer such agonies, be put through such fear, such torture, just so we can slice them up and have chunks of them in gravy? It’s disgusting.’

The young Aria, having never thought about it before, had found herself agreeing wholeheartedly, for almost the very first time introduced to some of the ghastliness of the world and, at the same time, the selfless but agonising distance a parent is prepared to hike in order to satisfy a child as her mother, despite her uneasy misgivings, had always prepared meat for her because she had always enjoyed it, always asked for it. Suddenly sick at the thought of what she had been so ignorantly ingesting, and been responsible for, Aria vowed that from that day, from that very minute, she would do the same and would never eat meat again, would never be the cause of pain and distress to any living thing.

‘There have been relatively recent replaceings,’ Doctor Cummings was saying, his voice breaking into her reverie, ‘that show there are multiple pathways to storage of fear-inducing memories, and this could lead to new treatments for patients with psychiatric disorders for whom conscious access to their traumatic memories is needed if they are to recover.’

Aria tried to focus on the doctor but instead saw Kelly from school, younger and much slimmer, her hair a natural dark colour, telling her how excited she was that Jonathan Rakeman had just asked her out, that they were all going to Allison’s and would she like to meet up with them?

‘Do you think he’ll want to kiss me?’ Kelly asked, applying a fresh coat of lip balm, talking excitedly and quickly. ‘Do you think he’ll try anything else?’

Her smile implied that she wouldn’t have minded if he did. She had always been more progressive than Aria, in that respect and in many others.

Before she could answer the scene changed again. Aria was walking along a street towards Kelly, looking a few years older, apparently locked in an argument with whom she assumed must be Jonathan. They were shouting and gesticulating, not caring who might be listening. As Kelly saw her, she called, ‘Oh, Aria, sorry to hear about your mum and dad.’

Aria put her head down, avoiding the stares from passers-by. ‘Thanks,’ she said, her pace quickening, escaping into the nearest shop.

‘Yes, madam,’ a young woman said immediately, before Aria was even through the doorway. ‘How are you today?’

Aria looked around, at the long rows of glass cabinets, at the display cases filled with necklaces and rings displayed on the fingers of disembodied, scratch-resistant fibreglass hands and around overlong necks and shoulders, although it was not clear which hand belonged with which decapitated nape.

‘Rubies?’

‘Sorry?’ Aria asked, distractedly, watching as the fingers gesticulated beckoningly to her, curling and inviting her towards them.

‘Rubies? Would you like to see the rubies? Rubies?’

The room began to swirl and shimmer. Bright lights shone into her face as though she were on stage, starring in her own poorly received production, the protagonist in her own under-developed life. A doorway appeared at the far end of the room, the same heavy and scarred wooden door with the rusting black hinges that Aria had seen somewhere before, although she could not remember where. She tried to step towards it but found she could not move, that she was somehow trapped where she stood, as dislocated as the ringed hands, all of them now gently tapping at the glass of their cases.

‘Rubies?’ asked the woman again.

‘Aria, are you okay?’

Startled, Aria jerked back and looked into the concerned face of her friend.

‘Ruby?’

‘Aria, talk to me. Are you okay?’

She looked around, realising that she was on her own sofa, in her own living room.

But, how?

‘I knocked and knocked, but you were just sitting here, like you couldn’t hear me. You didn’t even move. So, I used my spare key. I hope you don’t mind, but I was starting to freak out a bit.’

Still unable to focus, still surprised at what had happened, Aria asked, ‘How did I get here?’

‘You don’t remember?’

‘I was…I was at the doctor’s,’ Aria began, slowly, clumsily, ‘at the psychiatrist’s, and he was telling me all this stuff that I didn’t really understand. And then we were talking about my mum and dad, about the accident and how I was having trouble with my memory, and then…’ She stopped, biting her lip, thinking hard. ‘Then I was with Kelly, this girl from school who I saw in the street the other day, and then I was in a jeweller’s and the woman was trying to sell me rubies…’

Ruby, listening carefully, holding her hand as she spoke, was starting to develop a deep concern for her friend. She had received a phone call from Doctor Cummings’ assistant a short time before, telling her that they wondered whether she would be able to collect Aria, or at least arrange some transport for her. She had become quite upset, the assistant said, and had refused help from both herself or any of the other staff. Just as Ruby was arranging to come immediately, grabbing her bag and coat as she moved through her house, Aria had burst through the doors of the office and onto the street. Having driven around for almost an hour looking for her, Ruby had at last thought to come to here, in case she had returned, before taking the option of telephoning the police.

‘You’re safe now,’ Ruby told her gently, squeezing her hand. ‘I’m here, so just take a couple of deep breaths and I’ll go and make us some coffee in a minute. Just make sure you’re all right first.’ Then, wondering if she should ask, hesitating with the worry that it might makes things worse, she said, ‘Did the doctor say anything that you think might be useful?’

Aria looked at her, her eyes red, her skin pale. She looked tired, deflated, beaten. She looked as if her life had suffocated her and had left her as nothing more than an ashen shell, the foam spat helplessly onto the beach as the ocean draws away.

‘I don’t think there’s anyone that can help,’ she said sadly. ‘I just think - and I know what you’ll say - but I think we just need to replace this place, this village.’

‘But what do you think you’ll replace? What is it there that you think can help?’ Ruby was almost whispering.

‘I don’t know. I just have the feeling that it will tell me something, show me something. It’s as if I’m inside a giant puzzle and I keep getting all these clues without knowing how to put them together. Signs, trying to point me in the right direction. I just know there’s something there, waiting for me.’

Ruby sighed. She didn’t understand, couldn’t see what Aria was trying to do, and was reluctant to pursue it too far. Still, she asked, ’But how do you know everything’s related? How do you know these things are all signs?’

‘I just know,’ Aria said, feeling a sudden, refreshed determination. ‘I don’t know how to explain it, don’t know how to put it into words, but it’s like, somehow, I’ve always known. It feels like I’m on the path I’m supposed to be on, standing at the crossroads, and I need to get to the village, to Easthope, so that I know where to go next. That’s what these dreams or visions, or whatever you want to call them, that’s what they are. They’re wake-up calls, sirens, telling me to get there and replace out whatever it is I’m supposed to know, to replace the answer to a question I haven’t learned how to ask yet.’

‘And there’s no way I’m going to be able to talk you out of it, is there?’ Ruby asked, resignation in her voice.

‘I just have to go,’ Aria said simply, as though there was no other possible resolution because there was no other answer. She had to replace her way there, had to take her place in the village so that it might survive, so that death would not be in vain and hope would not perish without first replaceing its wings and soaring towards the sun.

‘Did you replace anything out, when you were doing that research? About where this village might be?’

‘Well, no,’ Aria admitted, her spirit lifting as it, too, looked to the sun, ‘but I think I was searching in the wrong place, for the wrong thing. I have to wait for it to come to me, I think, rather than be looking for it at all.’

Ruby considered what she had said. If this was what Aria wanted to do, if her belief in what she was saying was genuine and would help her - would, in fact, result in her being able to get past this, to move on from this strange period - then she could think of no reason why she shouldn’t do it, and no reason why she shouldn’t help her.

‘How will you know when it’s time?’ Ruby asked. ‘I mean, it could be months before this reveals itself to you. And sweetie, I really don’t know if you can carry on like this for months.’

‘I think it’s coming,’ Aria replied, looking at her with a serious, resolute expression. ‘I think it’s coming soon.’