Aria Remains
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

#

Aria stood, looking up and down the alleyway, first to one end and then to the other. Her tee shirt was damp, perspiration sealing it tightly to her body, but still she lifted its hem to wipe her brow, confusion and a Cimmerian sense of foreboding now blazing within her. The ginger cat had gone and Aria, against her better judgement, wondered exactly what it had been trying to tell her if it had, in fact, been the one talking to her. But then, if she hadn’t been in the company of a talking ginger cat, a cat she had been walking by, stopping to stroke and talk to for years without response - then who else could it have been?

She scanned the length of the alley again and saw that, somehow, without a sound and without her noticing any change, it had stretched, had become a tensile thing, extending much further. No more was it the forty, perhaps forty-five feet it had always been; now it appeared to be at least two-hundred feet from end to end, attenuating, tapering, the fences that ran along both sides receding to the horizon, shifting and distorting within the one point perspective. The quiet roads, the homogeneous brick-fronted houses with the white PVC window frames, the collection of unblemished and well maintained cars that sat upon each driveway and had always been visible from the alley, were all now gone.

It makes no difference what I do, she thought, since the future is already what it was always going to be.

Is that right? Is that correct?

Is that what the cat, or the universe, or some previously unrevealed part of my brain was telling me? Was it something I already knew, a memory passed to me at some point that is only now resurfacing?

Not sure if it were relevant or not, she decided to call Ruby but, feeling for her phone in her pocket, she remembered she was wearing the faded black pyjamas with the distinctive white polka dots, and that she had left her phone… well, somewhere else, somewhere in her house.

By the bath tub, that was it, when she had set aflame the candles and was listening to the Bert Firman Dance Orchestra through a small wireless speaker that broadcast music from the rapidly declining streaming service she had been planning to abrogate due to its soaring price and truncated quality. It was but one more thing added to a list of things she had wanted or needed to do before the requirement for lists and plans and meeting deadlines and watering gardens and feeding birds and squirrels had become nullified, had lost its value because there were larger issues at hand, greater complications to conquer.

Where the houses and the cars had been now sat two pitch-black circles. Unable to decide whether they were simply solid objects or were, instead, openings to somewhere else, impossible portals to the future or the past, she stared at them both in turn for several minutes, waiting for something to happen. Wishing for something to happen.

They remained unchanged, stoic, safeguarding their secrets.

Why has the alleyway grown so long? she asked herself, then wondered why she hadn’t asked herself the question earlier. How could it have happened? Or, maybe, it’s not the alley that’s got bigger, but I’ve become smaller.

She looked down, trying to estimate the distance of her eyes from the stone path. About the same, she calculated, thinking of bottles labelled ‘Drink Me’ and playing cards that had legs and could walk and would not be rearranged.

A dizziness struck her as she continued to look at the ground, forcing her apart from herself so that she was watching herself from somewhere else while in the process of looking at the ground, but from another position entirely. She was no longer connected, an answering machine left unplugged and forgotten, hoping without promise for calls that it feared would never come. She was stranded left of the dial, a station no one listened to, far from the centre, broadcasting from a reserved band. A crackling fuzz filled her ears, warped snatches of sound fizzing past. Bert Firman and his orchestral associates on the back of an open truck, zooming by, the tune shattered by the motion. Further away, yet still close when held in comparison with other things, a group of galaxies awakened and came into being, the earliest and most massive ever discovered. They showed that the universe was expanding faster and with much more immediacy than anyone had ever predicted. At the same time, yet much later, rebounding against the walls of time, a supermassive black hole escaped its own galaxy, travelling at four million miles per hour. As it went, instead of hoovering up the light it produced a trail of baby stars that stretched 200,000 light years in length.

‘Look at us,’ the universe said. ‘Look at what we can do.’

Not usually the boasting kind, this remarkable demonstration of hubris caused Aria to raise her eyes to the sky, even though it was not intended to be boastful at all but was, instead, nothing more than a cry for her attention because it wanted to be as special as she.

‘I have always looked,’ she said, smiling, a hand shielding the sun from her eyes. ‘And I have always loved you.’

She didn’t require a response, for all at once she knew and understood how the universe felt about her. She had always known, she realised now, and had always felt under its protection.

‘When will it be over?’ she asked, although she wasn’t completely sure that she had.

No reply came but, if it had, it would have been, ‘When will it begin?’

At the far end of the alleyway Aria became aware of movement, of sentience. She lowered her eyes from all that was happening above her and saw, as though projected through the black circle where the cars and houses used to be, an old woman carrying a very young baby. The woman moved extremely slowly, and Aria was unable to tell whether it was due to her great age or if it was because she was being overly careful with the tiny child. Both were silent, with no hint where they were going or what they were doing, but the old woman’s face betrayed painful regret. Even though they were facing Aria’s position, the woman’s movements indicating she was walking towards her, they neither got any closer to her, nor seemed to notice she was even there. It was almost like their projection was of the type found in theatres, that the alleyway was its screen, the black circle its lens.

‘Hello?’ Aria said.

The old woman stopped, glanced down at the child in her arms and then looked all around. She wiped a tear from her cheek and then, gently wrapping the infant’s blanket around her a little more tightly, she steadily bent down, placed it on the ground and, wiping her face and looking around once more, she gradually faded away. Aria took a few steps towards the child, shocked at what she had seen and wanting to help, to collect it in her arms, to take care of it. But then, still forty feet away it, too, vanished and immediately she became aware of something else, something at the other end of the alley. A young girl of perhaps seven or eight, holding hands with what Aria assumed were her mother and father. They all looked very happy, were all dressed in light summer clothes, a large and floppy straw sun hat perched quite precariously upon the girl’s head, and Aria knew straight away that they were on their way to the seaside.

She smiled, recalling how her parents would take her to the beach a couple of times each summer. They would eat ice cream and donuts, would go on funfair rides, build sandcastles with pink plastic spades and buckets and then, shoes off, bodies tensed against the chilly water, they would paddle at the very edge of the ocean. The very edge of the world, it seemed to her then. Such a tremendous size, such scope. The never-ending water, stretching out to the horizon, an impossible depth beneath the surface. She hadn’t been able to believe that it ever ended, that there could possibly be another edge to it, another shore out there somewhere, and that there may be another little girl, just like her, curling her toes in the foam of the ocean just as she was. At her feet there would come a never-ending series of ethereal blue flashes, proudly carried to shore by each wave that broke against the sand. Thousands of millions of bioluminescent plankton, the tiny creatures disturbed by the motion of the water and by the presence of the young girl, emitting their light so that she could see for thousands of millions of miles, wanting her to understand that the horizon no longer had to be her boundary, that there was nothing holding her in place and there was nowhere she would not be able to travel.

She heard the coarse call of seagulls, remembered them being everywhere, swarms of them coming as close as they dared to the people eating their sandwiches and crisps, the huge, fearless birds swooping in, driven by the sea breeze and plans for embezzlement. Small children, those smaller than she, dropping their ice creams or losing their grip on their balloons and kites, tearfully shrieking for their mothers, assuming they could rectify the intractable situation because that’s what mothers were supposed to be able to do. Dogs running around happily, digging in the sand, running in and out of the water, shaking themselves wildly, slurping water from metal bowls, barking their thank yous to their human carers for ignoring the signs that prohibited them from the shore until September.

Barking.

She could hear it now, the baying of a dog, and suddenly she was overcome by a deep feeling of loss, a terrible, aching sensation of mourning. It was a stinging, debilitating sadness at the death of an animal she had never known, a pet she had never had. Yet it was so real, so painful, how much she missed this most exalted hound.

‘Can we have a dog?’ she remembered asking.

‘No, sweetheart,’ her mother would always reply. ‘It just wouldn’t be fair. We’re both at work all day, you’re at school. There’ll be no one to look after it.’

‘Aria, get over here.’

She followed the sound of this new voice and saw Kelly, fifteen years old, school uniform, standing where the abandoned child had been placed by the old woman just a short time before. Kelly from school, tie loose, grey skirt twisted, curly hair even more tangled than usual. She was emerging from behind a tree, a half-empty plastic bottle of cider cracking in her grip. Moments later she saw Jonathan Rakeman appear from behind the same tree, adjusting his grey school trousers, his face flushed, his grin self-satisfied and sickly.

‘You want some of this or not?’ Kelly asked, waving the bottle in Aria’s direction, wiping her other hand on her skirt.

Behind her, Aria saw Allison’s, the youth club she and Kelly, Terri and Julie and a whole group of others would often visit on Friday evenings. Straight out of school, they would head into town for fast food and cheap booze before walking all the way back to the small and astoundingly unimpressive wood-lined hall next to the church and the graveyard, where they buried her mother’s sister after her death at only twenty-three. Never particularly enamoured with the lifestyle, the scene, always preferring her music to have been drawn from a far more diverse, far more radical and seditious pool than the contemporaneous stylings offered by Allison’s lecherous, ponderous DJ. She had never been interested in drinking herself to insensibility and fumbling with boys while everyone else watched, had never quite fitted in and so she had always kept herself at the edge of things. It was rare that she wouldn’t go along with them all, since she was fifteen and, devoid of other offers, could think of nothing worse, nothing more likely to make her a pariah than staying at home on Friday nights. But still, it was not something she enjoyed, a participation she relished.

Kelly, apparently bored of waiting for Aria to take her up on her kind offer of drinking warm cider from a bottle at least two other mouths had already polluted, took Jonathan by the hand and led him back inside the youth club.

‘I think I’m, you know, pregnant,’ Kelly whispered to her a couple of years later, sitting in class, the tutor having just gone to do some photocopying.

‘What?’ Aria had replied, scandalised.

‘Yeah,’ Kelly nodded. She looked ashen, terrified. ‘I think it’s John’s. Must be. But we only did it the once. Well, no, it was a bit more often than that, but we were always careful. Well, fairly careful.’

It turned out that it wasn’t yet time for John-john to make his appearance, being the first in a series of false alarms that flustered the incautious couple, but it was the afternoon the police car pulled into the college car park.

‘Aria,’ said the returning Mr Knowles, struggling with his armful of paper as he opened the classroom door. He looked like Kelly, his face leaden, his voice unsteady. ‘Could you come with me, please?’

It was in the Principal’s office that she learned of her parent’s car crash. Mrs Thomas introduced her to the female police officer and then, together, with a composed empathy, they explained to her what had happened.

As the memories of these events returned to Aria, as clear and distinct as if they had only happened yesterday, her emotions swirling and storming inside her, she realised the manifestations at the end of the alleyway had now disappeared and that she was alone again. She could still hear the dog’s bark, although now it sounded much further away. For several minutes she waited, looking from side to side, wondering what she should do, what she was supposed to do. She considered how she felt no surprise, no fear at this latest series of bizarre occurrences, wondering what that said about her, what it meant for her state of mind. Still flushed with the energised feeling of power she had felt when she had taken her bath…when was that? Yesterday? Earlier this morning? She had no idea, decided it wasn’t important. It was the strength within her, the idea that she would soon meet her destiny, that she was in all places at all times, that was what mattered now. The notion came to her that this was a way for the universe to prepare her for what was going to happen. She was being conditioned, her mind and soul prepared for the venture to come, clearing away the impediments to lucidity. Her eyes now closed, she concentrated on her breathing, slow and steady, her heart calm. A gentle breeze glided around her, toyed with the hem of her pyjamas, closed her eyes and flicked the hair that lay across her back, lifting her up and taking her away.

The flurry fell aside and she realised she was standing in front of a large and spectacular mansion, flowers and trees all around her, a maze and swimming pool further behind. She didn’t know if she was still in the alleyway and this was another apparition, or if she had actually been physically transported to this new place. I recognise this, she thought, real or imagined. I’ve seen this place before, this grand house amongst this beautiful countryside, although I don’t think I’ve ever been here.

‘What do you think, now it’s all finished?’

‘Robert?’

He was here, he was with her again, those green eyes shining into hers.

‘How long did it take you?’ she asked.

‘It’s taken all this time, all the time that I’ve been away from you. Did you see the maze, and the swimming pool? I hope that you like them. Everything I did, I did with you in my mind.’

‘It’s all so wonderful,’ Aria said, gazing up at him.

It was as though they had never been apart while, at the same time, she felt she was meeting a long-lost friend, someone she had been missing for hundreds of years. He looked just as he had the night they first met, the blue jeans and the ‘Bell Jar’ tee shirt, the same bright smile.

‘Oh, Robert, I so wish it hadn’t happened, that we had never met.’

‘Why do you say that? Meeting you was one of the highlights of my life.’

Her heart skipped. ‘But if we hadn’t met you might still be…’

‘Alive?’ Robert finished.

His smile became softer, then more sad.

‘I was alive that night, more alive than I had been for so long. But we mustn’t dwell on regret, on what might have been. We should, instead, remember that spark we shared, the happiness of that night, the promise it gave us.’

‘Do you think we would have been happy?’ Aria asked, feeling the emotion in her voice. ‘Do you think we would have had a future together?’

‘I know we would,’ Robert said, taking her hand, ‘and it would have been the most sublime, most beautiful time.’

They embraced then, holding onto each other very tightly, for a very long time. The sun turned its rays directly onto them, focused upon them, throwing the rest of the world into darkness since, just for those moments Aria and Robert held one another, there was nothing else in the entire universe that required any light.

‘Do you know,’ Aria began, as they moved their heads apart so they could look at each other again. ‘Do you know what happened to you? Do you know who… who was responsible?’

Robert nodded solemnly. ‘I do, but I cannot say. I have learned a great deal in my time away from you, and there are a great many things I would like to be able to tell you but, for reasons that I think will become known to you, I cannot say anything now.’

He held her close again and then, as though she was waking from a dream, she felt him fade away, dissolving into the past. The flowers that surrounded her bowed their heads in a respectful tribute to those who have passed and those who remain even if they are now slightly less, have become smaller through their deprivation than they once were, yet they felt no sadness because they had long ago fathomed the power of renascence and the spirit of love. Aria sighed and opened her eyes and she, too, experienced the same awareness as the flowers, whose heads continued to be bowed since now, without warning, the bright day had suddenly became warm, muggy night and the moon, full with the colour of creme brûlée, gave the fences that lined the alleyway a glowing, ghostly aspect. Silence had fallen all around, the kind of soft, condensed silence that only came with darkness. Aria had always liked the quiet of night, its tranquil stillness. It lent to her a comfort, set her at ease and, although feeling her heart breaking just as it had when Ruby told her of Robert’s murder, she was grateful to know he was still there, still somewhere, and she came to feel that they had retained their closeness despite the great distance between them.

She stretched her arms upwards, reaching the sky above, feeling the stars graze her fingertips as they moved by and then looked again to the far end of the alleyway. There was a tiny light, stark against the darkness, right at the base of one of the fence panels. A light that danced like the micro-inferno at the tip of a match, that called to her, beckoning her towards it. Slowly, repeatedly looking over her shoulder as she went, she approached the light and saw that it was growing bigger and bigger until, by the time she was standing in front of it, it had become a flaming doorway.

’We believe you are ready now, and it is for you to guide us where it is we must follow.’

Aria snapped around, expecting to see the three sisters because the voice sounded like all of them were speaking at once, but there was nobody there, nothing she could see in the gloom. It seemed as though the black circles that had been at both ends of the alley were converging upon her, closing in on her, stealing the light of the moon.

‘And follow we shall, until we, all of us, reach the end.’

But I shall be burned, she thought.

No, you won’t get burned, she told herself. Just go through. Follow your destiny, take control of your fate.

Cautiously she reached forward, slowly moving a hand towards the flames. It became no hotter and she felt no effect of the fire.

She reached further, her hand meeting the point where the fence should have been and then going through, as though it was not there at all. Past her elbow, up to her bicep and then, closing her eyes, she bent her head forward, passing through the fiery doorway until her whole body had been consumed.