Aria Remains
CHAPTER FIVE

#

The harshly shrill insistence of her phone prised Aria from the arms of Morpheus, jolting her from her slumber. A vague and distant realisation of what was happening and the memory of repetition allowed her to grab the device from her nightstand without opening her eyes, its charging cable dropping to the floor and curling behind the cabinet as it unplugged. Groggy, her head still thick with sleep and with dreams that would never be recalled, she pressed the screen and mumbled a greeting.

‘You still asleep?’ Ruby asked, surprise clear in her voice. ‘C’mon, it’s almost ten. I want the juice.’

‘Juice?’ Aria had no idea what her friend was talking about. From somewhere - nowhere - she saw two peeled oranges complaining that they were cold.

‘Yeah, about Robert.’

‘What about…about what?’ Aria blinked and the oranges macerated into nothing.

’You are still asleep. Look, phone me back when you join the rest of the world.’

Ruby disconnected and Aria released her phone to the duvet, rubbing her eyes. The call had been so quick, and had awoken her with such a start that, for a moment, she wasn’t sure it had happened at all. Then she remembered Robert and the night before, the night at Ruby’s house where she had met this charming, interesting, good looking man and had seen, for the first time in many months, a glint of light around the aperture to the future.

She leant her head back against the pillow and smiled. It had been such a long time since she had felt this way about somebody, so long since she had even thought about opening herself to someone new. It was both exciting and terrifying, and she savoured the feeling since she knew that it meant she had come alive again, that she was still in possession of a heart that worked.

She picked up her phone again and, as it recognised her face and its screen glided away, she suddenly had a troubling thought. Swiping at the screen she looked at the date, blinking away the last blurry vestiges of sleep.

Saturday the 31st.

But the dinner party had been last night, and last night had been Thursday.

She thought for a few moments, carefully twisting her neck in search of a position to relieve the faint ache that had taken hold overnight. It can’t be Saturday, she thought. I can’t have lost an entire day.

She scrolled and jabbed and connected Ruby’s number.

‘That was fast,’ she said. ‘So, you’re up and ready to tell me all about it? I was getting worried, since I hadn’t been able to reach you yester…’

‘What day is it?’ Aria interrupted.

‘Huh?’

‘Today - what day is it?’

Ruby was quiet for a moment and then said, ‘It’s Saturday. Hey, is everything all right?’

‘You’re sure? Sure it’s not Friday?’

‘Of course I’m sure, I have the hangover to prove it. What’s going on? Are you okay?’

‘Definitely Saturday?’

‘Definitely, definitely,’ Ruby promised, her voice sounding as though she were smiling. ‘So, where were you yesterday? I tried to call a few times but there was no signal or something, like your line was dead.’

‘Can I call you back again in a little while?’ Aria asked. ‘Im fine, I just think I need to wake up a bit more.’

She ended the call without giving Ruby the chance to speak again, then pulled the duvet away and swung her legs over the side of the bed. They felt stiff and tender, and her shoulders were sore. She winced as she pulled a tee shirt over her head, then awkwardly paced the landing to her workroom and, glancing at the computer’s lifeless screen, she realised she hadn’t yet put on her watch. It didn’t matter; she had no plans for working yet. First, she needed to figure out what happened to yesterday. For a moment she sat at the desk, considered taking a drink from the glass of sparkling water next to her and then, uncertain how long it had been there, decided that her priority should be coffee. Walking slowly down the stairs, rubbing her brow as she tried to sort through her thoughts, she prepared the coffee and sat at the kitchen table.

Retracing her steps, she remembered with reasonable clarity that she had left Ruby’s house on Thursday. Just before eleven. The moon was bright and had, with great chivalry, escorted her as she walked through the alleyway, the shortcut between her house and Ruby’s that she had navigated thousands of times before. It had been very quiet, and there had been no one else around. If it wasn’t for a few of the houses still displaying the fuzzy, muted evidence of lights behind their curtains and blinds, and if the ginger cat hadn’t scampered across the road ahead of her, she would have been forgiven for thinking the entire world had fallen fast asleep. That the planet was tucked safety into its bed, that stories had been softly read and dreams had begun their stealthy insurgence, barely able to wait until they could reveal their own distorted, indistinct interpretation of the day.

So, she had turned into the alleyway and then…

And then what?

She closed her eyes as she strained to replace the answer, but nothing more came to mind than the phone call from Ruby that had awoken her to Saturday. It was as though the day hadn’t existed at all, that someone, the person in charge of all days and months, had decided that no one really needed Friday the 30th and that no one would probably even notice if it was just removed from the calendar. ‘Let’s just go straight to Saturday,’ they might have said. ‘What difference does one Friday make? We have plenty of others in stock. Besides, everyone loves August, so let’s just bring it a bit closer.’

She flooded the cafetière with boiling water, waited for a much shorter period than usual before depressing the plunger and pouring herself a cup and then took it upstairs. Maybe, she hoped, the explanation lay within the files and folders of her computer.

Almost an hour of scanning emails and sales reports, messages and the designs she was currently working on offered no clue. She had done nothing further to her work than she remembered from Thursday, and the last of the long line of emails and other communications she had responded to was also timed and dated at just before she left to go to Ruby’s house. Apparently she hadn’t done anything, had not spoken or written to anyone at any point since then. Finishing her coffee, she wondered if it were at all even remotely possible that she had slept through the day, that she had gone to bed on Thursday night, a little bit drunk and a great deal stimulated by possibility as all are stimulated by possibility when they have just met someone they would very much like to see again and again, and that she had remained there, absent from her life for over thirty-six hours. And that, while she had been truant, the entire rest of the world had forgotten about her, had been doing whatever it was it would have done anyway if she had never been a part of it. It was almost as though, for those lost hours, she hadn’t existed at all.

She shook her head.

She had never slept well or, at least, she had never been able to sleep all through the night. Drifting away had always been straightforward and almost immediate - several times she had been told that she had nodded off almost while in the middle of a sentence - but it was the prolonging of her slumber, the ability to remain in such a state of quiescence that had always eluded her. If she had only awoken once during the night, replying to the unrelenting call of nature, that would be a rare and glorious accomplishment, and it was akin to the successful recovery of Martian gold for her to still be inert after six in the morning. Now she noticed, as her stomach growled and she glanced at the time on her computer screen, that it was almost noon.

Making her way back downstairs, thinking of what she could make for lunch despite having no inclination towards anything in particular, an idea suddenly struck her. Pouring another coffee and putting the mug into the microwave to warm it up, she picked up her phone and scanned her recent calls and messages. Several times throughout Friday Ruby had attempted contact, leaving a pending trail of questions in regard to her whereabouts, and unanswered phone calls that, for some reason, had not been forwarded to her voice mail service.

‘i sent josh round to knock at your door,’ said the last of Ruby’s texts, as usual all in lower case. ‘no answer, so guessed you were out with robert - or in with him :) let me know details stat’

Aria frowned, then opened her eyes in surprise. There was a message from Robert.

‘Josh gave me your number. It was lovely to meet you last night. Hope you got home okay. Give me a ring if you’d still like to do Saturday. It’s Rob, by the way.’

The microwave sounded and she retrieved her mug, disappointed that she had missed the message. She sipped the coffee, placed the mug on the table and, feeling her heart gambol, began composing her reply.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she typed, ‘but I had a problem with my phone and…’

She paused. Was this really the ideal way to edge towards the boundary of starting a relationship? Could the first foundations of what might become an immense and infinite structure, its hallways and balconies forever leading to illuminated chambers in which love and passion and loyalty and elation reclined patiently, waiting for her participation, her concord, be built upon such weak ground as that of a lie? But then, what else could she say? She literally had no idea.

She sighed and continued to type, although she had only managed a couple of words before the phone sounded and shuddered again and Ruby’s smiling face filled the screen, an image captured immediately following her emergence from the hairdresser’s, new box braids mounting her face with a flattery that gave her the air of a movie star. Aria had always loved that shot of her, had always considered it an almost impossibly pure expression of confidence and delight.

‘Aria, I have something to tell you.’

She sounded upset, her voice wavering.

‘Ruby, you okay?’

‘It’s bad news, I’m afraid. Very bad news.’

Aria swallowed, her stomach tightened, her shoulders tensed. She hoped that this was one of those occasions where the harbinger was worse than the actual report.

‘What’s happened? Is Josh okay?’

‘It’s Robert,’ Ruby said, the volume of her voice falling as though she didn’t want to be talking at all. ‘He’s… Well, I might just as well come out and say it…’

‘Say what? What is it, Ruby?’

‘He died.’

Aria didn’t move, didn’t speak.

‘He was killed.’

She couldn’t understand, couldn’t make sense of what Ruby was telling her.

‘What do you mean, he was killed? How can he have been killed?’

She heard Ruby sniff and then take a longer, deeper breath. Her mind had come to a halt, unwilling to process this information, pushing the poison away.

‘He was… well, it’s not very nice, Aria. I think it might be better if you just came round. Or I can come to you?’

‘No, no,’ Aria said, floundering, wanting this to be some failed attempt at comedy, a sick, repellent joke, some ruse that would bring her to Ruby’s house in order for Robert to spring a marvellous surprise on her, so that he could tell her that he had arranged a holiday for them both and so that Ruby would clap and smile and cheer. He would take her on a cruise, to visit lands no one had ever visited before and from which there was no known return, since no one had bothered to discover a way out because no one had ever wanted to leave, so beautiful and paradisal was it.

’No, I’ll come to yours. Killed?’

‘Yes,’ Ruby whispered. ‘It’s best we talk in person. Come over whenever you’d like, if you’re sure you don’t want me to come to you.’

‘Yes, I’ll come soon.’

Aria heard the line drop to silence and felt her heart turn to stone. She carefully placed her phone next to her mug and leaned forward slightly, resting an elbow on the table and rubbing her fingers and thumb against her eyes.

How could something like this have possibly happened? People don’t get killed. ‘Killed’ implies some kind of assault, some kind of attack. People who get killed usually mix with killers, don’t they? Like gangs or drug dealers or something. Either that, or they get murdered by someone they know. But Robert didn’t know anyone, and she was pretty sure he wasn’t a member of a drug-running gang of murderers, reprobates who would think no more of taking a life than of taking someone’s purse. No, this was not that. It wasn’t the kind of thing that could happen to people she knew, someone so young, someone as young as she. It had never happened, hadn’t been something she had even ever heard of happening to anyone.

Killed?

Her body had become tense and the pressure in her ears brought to her a forlorn unsteadiness as she stood and walked upstairs. She pulled on Thursday’s jeans, ran her fingers through the tangles of her hair and stepped into her untied trainers as she left the house. She moved stiffly, mechanically, guided by sorrow and shock, seeing and hearing nothing, disinterested in everything, through the alleyway to Ruby’s door.

She looked as though she had been crying as she opened the door and, as Aria was shown into the house, she saw Josh sitting in the living room, his head bowed.

‘I don’t know why I’m so upset,’ Ruby said, sniffing and trying to smile as she and Aria joined Josh. ‘I only just met him, too. I think it’s just the shock, and it’s probably more that I’m upset for you than anything else. I mean, I know you liked him.’

Aria nodded, sitting beside Josh as Ruby sank lightly into the armchair, her eyes fixed and unblinking, focused upon a future that had been stillborn, a past that had arrived so prematurely.

‘So, what happened?’ Aria asked in a voice that barely carried the weight to be heard.

Josh turned towards her, his eyes red with the evidence of tears.

‘It was last night,’ he said sadly. ‘Apparently, he’d been out to his local shops, just to pick something up for dinner. Something pre-made, probably, knowing him. Not much of a cook, I don’t think.’ He tried to laugh but, instead, it only made it seem as though he would start crying again. ‘Anyway, it was on the way back. Someone mugged him, I suppose, and as he tried to defend himself he was…’

He stopped, unable to say any more.

‘He was stabbed,’ Ruby interjected morosely, unprepared, unable to think of any better way of describing such a heinous act. ‘Or, well, not just stabbed but really…’ She searched for the right words again, trying too hard and choosing poorly. ‘Really cut up. They said it was quite a frenzied attack.’

She shook her head, disappointed in herself.

‘Who said?’ Aria asked, still not ready to comprehend anything she was being told because it seemed so wrong, so implausible. ‘Who did you speak to?’

‘My boss,’ Josh said, wiping the back of his hand across his eyes. ‘I think the police called him this morning. Rob only had a few numbers in his phone, and I suppose his was the first they came across. Or the first who answered.’

They became submerged within a chilled fog of silence for several minutes, each thinking about what had happened, trying to ignore the images that formed, without invitation, in their minds, images of Robert lying in the street, sanguinary, unfastened. Eventually Ruby offered to make some coffee, and Aria went to help her in the kitchen.

‘I’m so sorry about this,’ Ruby said. ‘I know you were planning to see him again. It’s just such a shock. Not just the news, but the way it happened. Barbaric. That’s how they described it, apparently. I mean, who does that? What kind of animal would do something so…. so..?’

Aria shook her head.

‘Animal is too kind,’ she said, wishing she were able to force herself back into reality, that she could finally alight upon something that would make some sense to her since all of this was so insane, so absurd. ‘Poor Robert. Only just moving here, just making friends. Do they have any idea who it might have been?’

‘None,’ Ruby replied, organising the coffee, spilling some of the grounds, almost dropping a mug to the floor. ‘There was nothing at the…the scene, I suppose you’d say. No clues, apparently, no evidence, nothing at all to give them any idea what exactly happened and who had done it. At least, that’s what Josh’s boss said. No one saw anything, no one heard anything. Maybe that’ll change as they investigate it more, but right now they apparently have absolutely nothing to go on.’

Josh wandered aimlessly into the kitchen and sat at the table with them, because he could think of nothing more significant or worthwhile to do. They drank their coffee quietly, wondering without knowing where to begin when something so awful had occurred. Aria stayed with them for several hours, picking at a plate of cheese and crackers that seemed to her as appetising as a meal of fingernails and tissue paper, her thoughts trapped deep inside an insensible, irredeemable chasm that floundered between Robert’s fate and her own disconcertment about how she had managed to completely lose a whole day. Just before six o’clock she politely refused Ruby’s offer of staying for dinner, said goodbye to them both and returned to her own house, the vague idea that she might leave her despondency behind proving as futile as her desire for it to be Thursday again, so she could take Robert home with her and wrap him in cotton and not allow him to leave her side ever again, so that he would still be alive today. She felt restless and useless, wanting to do something to take her mind away from such desolation but, at the same time, not wanting to do anything at all except sit and wait for the day to end.

It seemed an almost eternal span of time until finally the sky darkened, the house cooled and she prepared herself for bed. She felt heavy, her arms too ponderous for her body to support, her head a solid mass of confused emotions. As she lay on the bed, staring at the ceiling, at the tiny cracks where it met the walls and the discarded and dusty cobwebs that undulated gently in the air, she wondered why she was feeling so bad, so very upset about Robert. It almost seemed a more powerful emotion than those she had embraced just forty-eight hours earlier, and she began to worry if it was her own fate that was causing her this pain rather than his. But perhaps that’s why they call it loss, she considered, her eyes finally becoming leaden. Perhaps that’s why it feels so personal, so much like privation.

If only he had ordered a delivery from the takeaway where he had only to tell them his name, or toasted some bread and opened a tin of beans. If she had only replied to his message, had invited him over for something to eat so he wouldn’t have needed to do any shopping.

If only something, just the smallest thing would make sense.