Aria Remains
CHAPTER NINE

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‘Oh, god.’

The thick pulse in her head as she turned it against the pillow and the bright sunlight flooding into the room merged insidiously with the feeling that she had been badly beaten in her sleep and that her eyelids had been forcibly torn away. She felt dreadful, and knew already that her affliction was due not only to the coalescence of wine and brandy from the night before, that had already set about its painful business as she slept, but was also a physical manifestation of the chastening she felt for even daring to consider the possibility of inviting another man into her life, so soon after Robert’s murder.

‘Oh, god,’ she thought again, wiping her brow and pushing the duvet away from her stomach.

The air in the room was already torrid, and it was only for a moment that she felt some respite against her skin before the humidity caught her again, wrapping around her like diaphane. She squinted against the light and remembered shards of the ultimatum she had given to Sam as they parted, of the hurdles he would have to vault in order to make contact with her, and for a moment it made her feel slightly better that, in all probability, she wouldn’t even have to think about it anymore.

Then she remembered something else, something more troubling.

There had been another dream.

Cast in fragments across the stream of sleep, its pieces pointed to a time she had shared with Robert, standing on the small bridge by the railway station. They were leaning forward, watching the flow of the water, laughing, making plans, each deciding they wanted to know more about the other, and then… And then, for some reason for which Aria could replace no explanation, there was the man. The man she had been seeing wherever she went, the man who always seemed to be heading somewhere, who always seemed to be on some kind of mission, with his sunglasses and bag and determined expression. Except, now, he was unclear, hidden somehow, indistinct. Not exactly a shadow, not exactly an outline amongst the darkness but just… masked. Cryptic.

She sat up, pushed her pillow against the wall behind her and tried to remember the last time she had seen him. It must have been a few days before she met Robert, although she couldn’t be certain exactly when. All she knew for sure was that she hadn’t seen him since then, which she found strange since he had previously been something of a constant. Stranger still, she began to feel - to sense, almost - that it mattered she hadn’t seen him and that he was, somehow, important, and that seeing him had come to be something she had been relying upon.

She then remembered the dream she had the night she and Robert met, the one where she had found herself naked by the ocean, in which she couldn’t remember her name. Someone had been looking for her and so she had hidden, and then she had met the old woman and her little terrier, living in their dirty hut in the clearing by the woods.

What did it mean? If it meant anything at all.

She pressed her thumb and fingers against her eyes and, her throat dry and sore as she swallowed, decided that she needed something to drink. She pulled on a tee shirt, subconsciously feeling she should put something on, just in case she opened the bedroom door and found that she was still enveloped within a dream and she would encounter the rocks and the old woman and the little dog, then made her way stiffly and carefully downstairs, retrieving a two litre bottle of sparkling water from the shelf inside the fridge door and swigging from it heavily as she watched the gangs of starlings and sparrows taking off and landing again in the trees that lined her garden. She thought about taking some aspirin but then, knowing they probably wouldn’t have any effect, she instead showered, slipped into a thin cotton dress and settled in front of her computer.

Immediately, notifications of messages began to populate the right side of the screen and she started to work through them, through the orders for her work, the few emails from websites she had subscribed to that, at the time, had seemed a good idea but which now she hardly ever read, and some that slipped through the net - she had no desire to buy beige clothes or ugly, yet apparently comfortable, house sneakers, whatever they were - until she came to one she didn’t recognise that caught her attention.

The subject line said simply, ‘searching.’ Curious, rubbing her brow and taking another mouthful of water from the bottle as she waited for the email to open, she leant forward and peered at the screen.

‘Those who are seen, and who may not be able to see for themselves, are searching. They need your help. They need to replace you, or for you to replace them. They mean you no harm so do not be afraid. Find your way through the veil so that the past can survive.’

Aria leaned back into her chair, still looking at the message, trying to imagine what it could possibly mean. There was nothing to indicate from whom or where the message had come, no date, no time, just the title and, below that, her own name. She read it again and then, having forgotten about it until now, she went to retrieve her phone from the bedside cabinet, wondering if that might, perhaps, offer more information about this bizarre missive but no, there was nothing, no sign of the message anywhere on the device. All of the other messages had been delivered, all were duplicated as usual, but there was no sign of this one. Returning to the workroom, she sat at the computer and stared in disbelief at the screen.

The message had gone.

Disappeared.

She checked the small dustbin icon at the corner of the screen, in case she had inadvertently clicked the mouse in such a way that would have deleted it by mistake but no, it wasn’t there, nor anywhere else within the mail application. Not in another folder, not amongst the spam or anywhere else. It had just vanished.

She leaned back again, trying to recall exactly what the message had said. As she did, desperately putting the words together in her mind, hoping she hadn’t forgotten any of them, she was startled as the phone began to ring and vibrate on the desk in front of her.

‘This is getting to be a habit,’ Ruby said down the line, ‘me calling to replace out how things went, feeling rough as a concrete path.’

‘Ruby, something very strange has just happened.’

‘Don’t tell me you’ve managed to avoid the hangover? I tell ya, I feel as though a gang of hedgehogs strapped me to their backs and have been dragging me through a…’

‘No, Ruby, something really strange.’

Ruby fell silent as Aria told her about the message, about what it had said and how it had then just vanished.

‘It’s not in the…’

‘Nope,’ Aria interrupted, ‘not in the trash, the spam, not anywhere. It’s just gone, completely disappeared.’

Neither spoke for several moments, until Ruby asked Aria to repeat what the message had said.

‘It was something about seeing what cannot be seen, needing help, going through a veil, saving the past…’ Her words trailed away, chased by her uncertainty that she had remembered it correctly. The pain that had been lurking behind her forehead began dripping down like thick black paint, settling behind her eyes.

‘And that’s all?’ Ruby asked, swallowing as if she, too, were drinking water.

‘I think so, more or less, yeah.’

‘And there was no sender information or anything?’

‘No, nothing, no information at all, not even a time or date.’

’That is pretty weird,′ Ruby said, ‘but it’s probably just some scam or other. You know how good they are at these things these days. You don’t get those emails from South African princes asking for financial help anymore, do you?’

‘Well, no,’ Aria replied.

‘Much more sophisticated these days. You didn’t click on any links or anything, did you?’

‘No, but doesn’t it seem strange that it’s just disappeared, even if it was a scam?’

Ruby thought for a few seconds, then suggested, ‘That’s probably some setting you have in the mail app or something, just deciding for itself that it’s junk or whatever. I wouldn’t worry about it too much, as long as you didn’t click on anything.’

‘Yeah, I suppose,’ Aria agreed, rubbing her forehead again, telling herself that she would never, not under any circumstance, not even under threat of death, ever drink anything remotely alcoholic ever again.

‘Maybe it’s a wind-up,’ Ruby said, having given it more thought. ’Maybe it’s from someone you’ve annoyed. Have you annoyed anyone?′

‘I.. I don’t think so,’ Aria said, feeling sure she would have remembered if she had. She would rather do almost anything than irritate someone, would always try to be the bigger person or be as accommodating as possible in situations that she feared might lead to conflict. Afterwards she might complain, might curse them in her mind or to Ruby, but at the time she always preferred to be pleasant, to be helpful.

‘Or…’ Ruby said, ‘it could just be a prank. Like someone’s just jealous, someone else who has a shop like yours and they’re annoyed that yours is doing so well, especially since it’s still kind of new. Or someone who’s seen the videos you do, the videos of the journals and stuff you make, and is just being a pain. You know what people can be like, downvoting things just because they hate their own pointless lives.’

‘Maybe,’ Aria replied. That kind of thing did happen; she would usually receive a couple of downvotes even when the video she had posted had only been live for a minute or two. It was as if they were waiting to be mean, regardless of the quality or content of the segment.

‘Might even be someone you met when you were doing the wedding photos,’ Ruby suggested, seeming to warm to the idea as though she were relishing an opportunity to do some detective work. ‘Have you done anything like put together a photo album where there was no way to make the bride look pretty or something? Remember that one, when you said she asked why her face still looked like that?’

Aria laughed.

‘It was as though she thought there was some kind of beauty filter I should have turned on or something. Oh, Ruby, you do make me feel better.’

‘Wish you could make me feel better. Josh just thinks it’s funny, keeps quoting all these ancient old expressions for alcoholic at me from some book of insults he found. He literally just called me a cockeyed dipso, just as I was phoning you.’

‘I don’t feel exactly a hundred percent, I must admit,’ Aria said, thinking that actually she was at about fifteen, ‘but at least you’ve put my mind at rest about this. I hadn’t even thought that it might just be someone being nasty. I just thought… Well, I don’t know what I thought, but anyway…’

‘So, how did it go last night?’ Ruby asked, remembering Aria hadn’t rated it in the text she had sent, letting her know she was home.

Aria groaned, then said, ‘Oh yeah, well, I think it might be time for me to curtail my romantic interests for a while. First thing I thought about when I woke up was Robert.’

‘Yes, well,’ Ruby said, pausing to take another drink, ‘I think it might be time to put that behind you. I mean, I know it was sad and horrible and awful, but I do think you should try to get past it. I mean, that Sam, he seemed very nice.’

Aria didn’t answer, so Ruby asked, ‘Was he?’

‘Was he what?’

Aria had lost the tread of the conversation, spilling some water as she tried to manoeuvre the bottle towards her mouth, the plastic suddenly becoming flimsy, threatening to give way now that it was half empty.

‘Was he as nice as he seemed?’

‘Yes, I suppose so,’ Aria said noncommittally, examining the dark line of liquid tracing a path down the front of her dress and trying not to think of the wine she and Robert had spilled onto themselves when their glasses had collided with too much force.

‘Wow,’ Ruby said. ‘You’re really gonna make him work for it, huh?’

‘I don’t know. I just don’t know if I actually want to be with anyone. If it wasn’t for you…’

‘If it wasn’t for me you’d still be virgo intactus, as they say.’

‘Who says that?’ Aria said, laughing and then wincing at the throb in her head.

‘Well,’ Ruby admitted sheepishly, ‘Josh, mainly.’

They laughed again, then made a plan to meet later, Ruby inviting Aria to visit in the afternoon, perhaps to stay and have something to eat.

‘Just don’t worry about stupid jealous people and their stupid jealous emails,’ Ruby said in farewell. ‘And good luck with the hangover. See ya later.’

The day held other plans for Aria, however, and so she did not see Ruby later. Instead, following a reasonably swift dispersal of her crapulence following some food and another two litres of water, and a respectable display of capacity and adroitness from Sam in his pursuit of her digits, he called Aria in order to make arrangements for them to meet. Although still not persuaded of her regard for him, nor of her own preparedness for spending time with a man so soon after the loss of Robert, she nonetheless agreed that he could pick her up in his car and that they would travel across town to share a picnic in the park. The fresh air, she considered, would probably be good for her.

Upon arrival they found themselves a secluded position away from the sunlight, where Sam laid a blanket over the crisp, sunburnt grass and opened the large and aged hamper he had been struggling to carry, borrowed from his mother, within which were squashed a wide selection of sandwiches and rolls of various breads and fillings, since he wasn’t certain of her preferences and hoped to have stumbled upon at least something she might enjoy. He had also crammed in a similar array of flavoured crisps, a selection of little cakes and two small bottles of fizzy water. Although most of the items had lost their shape, now appearing somewhat flatter than they would have been in their pre-hamper form, and although the crisps had shattered into several thousand tiny pieces that made them almost impossible to eat, and although the water had warmed to something several degrees beyond room temperature, and although their presence piqued the resolute interest of several million ants who encircled the blanket, some of their hardiest and most courageous comrades attempting to scale the blanket itself, battling through the shedded wool and lint, it was still a pleasant couple of hours and Aria, despite still not experiencing anything close to the exuberant fervour that Robert had been so easily able to arouse in her, found that she enjoyed it well enough.

‘We’ll have to do this again,’ Sam suggested as they walked back up the hill beside the park, towards the place still half-shaded by trees where he had earlier parked his car. It was a kind of orange-red, small, not flashy, with a silver logo that looked like a misshapen ‘H’, held within a round-edged frame. Aria squinted at it attentively as they approached, since she knew Ruby would require reportage of its particulars and, having no interest in cars and no real capacity for telling any two apart from one another, she did need to concentrate on it.

‘Yes,’ Aria replied, smiling at him, although she didn’t know for certain if she meant it.

He was nice, and they had shared a nice time on a nice afternoon on a nice day. Nice, however, with its unexacting and inherent finitude, was not necessarily the vessel on which Aria wished to sail.

As they drove back, suffering a halting journey along an outdated and frustrating one-way system built before far too many people had bought far too many cars for the size of the town and which consequently required them to double-back on themselves from where they had been parked, it meant that they would have to pass the park gates. As Aria looked through the passenger window, shielding her eyes from the sun, her skin feeling sticky and grubby from the heat of the day, her breath caught in her throat. There, walking towards the gates, his stride as purposeful, his concentration as focused as ever, was the man. The man she had been seeing everywhere, about to enter the park. The man who had strayed into her dreams during the previous brandy-infused, perspirant night. Without knowing exactly why, seeing him made her feel gratified, reinforcing her reliance, suggesting to her that he represented an emblem of regularity and that, despite everything that had happened, it offered her an anchor, a mooring to the idea that things beyond her heartbreak were continuing as normal.

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