A Copied Life

The air was thick outside the painted-shut window. Through it, the field where his sad-eyed  mother had died, smothered by Alzheimer’s, walking in circles. The house was his parents’,  then theirs; too big for two and too small for her. 

A door divides them as she packs. 

She’d never been faithful; he’d never wanted to know. Her name whispered, as if escaping  from a radiator. 

The hot Sunday smell recalls her father’s stinging palm; a decade later he was dead, killed  by her mother’s post-war cooking; a beige revenge. She kept packing, the train due in forty  minutes. She had duplicates of her clothes and books elsewhere; it was quick. 

A car door slammed. Her husband was still on the stairs as she opened the front door.  Below him, her keys on the table lay like coins for the dead. The hot air hugged her as she  stepped outside. 

His brother Carl approached, arms tense. ‘Why are you still here?’ he murmured through thin  lips. She ignored him. 

The station was a thirty-minute walk away. The bag handles left stigmata dents in her nervy  palms. 

The stench of hot tarmac coated the inside of her nostrils. She’d always driven, sealed away  and blurring the suburbs. She paused, leaning against a disused metal pole, hot like a  lover’s touch. A car slowed noisily. She prepared to glare. 

Carl, window down, rolled alongside her, his mouth and eyes angry. Her bag hit him hard in  the face, blood exploding from his broken nose. Carl made a thin noise as she wiped the  base of her bag against the too-white passenger door, smearing red lines like signatures on  a contract. 

Twenty-two minutes. His whimpers were interrupted by the coughing car. Her heart  hammered; she walked steadily. 

The road was straight, flanked by blandbuilds and obscured by too-neat hedges on too-clean  walls. No life was allowed between the gaps in the pavement, no green marred the  brickwork. Her jacket was sweat-stained with fractal blooms. 

A short man neatened an already-trimmed hedge and said good morning in a too-familiar  way. She smiled loosely; it was easier. He said something else as she passed. 

A police car screamed by; its lights on in daytime as in her parents’ home. She remembered  the relief on her mother’s face when the final spiral of the corkscrew bit deep, her strain then  an evening’s release underneath the big light in the cold room. 

The sun made her scalp itch. 

‘Charlotte.’ 

Her name, clear but not loud. It can’t be him because he was dead on the stairs. 

She’d pushed him hard, and he’d fallen harder; a dull crack on the smooth stone stairs, then  his blood flowed like black water on a blasted fell. His eyes flickered unnoticed as she  stepped over him. Now he was here, still saying her name in that flat, pleading manner. 

When she’d closed their front door for the final time, she wondered why she hadn’t walked  out years ago; to know another person so deeply shouldn’t be permitted. 

He stayed the same distance from her no matter how quickly she walked. Eighteen minutes.

‘Charlotte, don’t go.’ 

She hurried, but she did not turn around. Buildings and metal meant a centre, and people  who wouldn’t acknowledge him but would notice her sweating body and badly hidden panic. 

She jog-walked in a way that she thought was unnoticeable, but she provoked irritating  glances from the dense, unparting crowd. 

She inserted silicon earphones into the dark, wet canal, wincing as they pushed too deep.  She played frantic music; it made no difference. The noise of engines and shoes, thick like  old paint, only muffled his voice. 

A jogging man spat, made hard contact with her right shoulder, and she spun, half stumbled;  one bag in the black gutter and the other open-mouthed and spewing her life onto the  pavement with feet and hurry; nobody stopped, everybody stared. 

She scooped her copied life into the mouth and retrieved her gutter-bag, the cream  leatherette slathered greeny-black. Don’t look, keep moving. 

The station was greasy-glassed and human-stained, treated as home, garden and toilet by  its always-shifting population. She dug the creased single journey train ticket from her dusty  jacket pocket. 

‘CHARLOTTE.’ 

She spoke his name too loudly; heads turned, commuter glare replaced indifference, her  face flushed as if from fucking. 

Smokers huddled around the station entrance. She’d given up two years ago and breathed  the erotic oxygen deeply. 

Hiding amongst the screens that advertised hair, money and health, she found the  departures board and felt his air-con-cold breath on the back of her neck. Being inside  brought him closer. 

Platform 3. 

A disembodied voice spat unintelligible instructions; weary bodies, like drugged swimmers,  obeyed; she followed them as he followed her. 

Her dirty ticket was checked suspiciously by a bleary, untucked man. His unblinking  bodycam watched as she passed and walked parallel with the waiting train, somehow  already full of eating, shouting passengers. 

She could see her murdered husband reflected in the dirty train windows, a stop-motion  jerkiness to his movements. She wondered if it was something to do with other dimensions,  or frequencies invisible to the human eye. She quickly boarded to stop the thought. He was  a few centimetres away, silent. 

The gangplank-width between the seats was filled with elbows, bags and children; she  sought the furthest, emptiest carriage. 

He was already there, sitting in an aisle seat. She was surprised that his head didn’t have  the ugly crack in it she’d accidentally glimpsed, but he looked fine apart from the  translucency. She sat in the aisle seat opposite. If she didn’t know him, she wouldn’t have  known he was dead. He studied the stain on the seat next to him, pursing his lips; his hurt tell. 

His mouth and voice were not synced. She understood him as if they were on opposite sides  of thick, scratched prison plexiglass.

‘You could have just left without killing me. I’d never have found you. Now, I know where you  are, all the time. I’ll be with you, all the time.’ 

The words appeared in her head as his badly dubbed mouth moved. She thought she’d  reached the limit of her hatred for him until now. She said nothing. 

The silence was hot, like sitting by a pallid bright window, skin burning. He stretched out his  right hand across the aisle, his fist closed around something moving. 

She closed her eyes and exhaled slowly. If he’d been alive, he would have felt her warm  breath, smelled the sour tang. She reached out without knowing why, her palm waiting. 

‘THAT’S HER!’ 

She opened her eyes. Her dead husband was no longer there. Carl, his flattened, crusted blood nose was not-quite touching the train window. His breath fogged the police’s gawping  view; there was something in the palm of her hand that she did not recognise. 

‘SHE SMASHED MY FACE IN… AND KILLED MY BROTHER!’ 

There was another police at the end of her carriage, too fat to move easily between the  empty, sweat-stained seats. 

She looked back at Carl, smeared with male agitation, through the window. The police next  to him hadn’t moved, was eyeing him unsympathetically. The police in the aisle now had his  stab vest snagged on a lazily left-upright armrest. He wasn’t looking at her. She stood. 

‘SHE’S MOVI…’ 

‘Sir, please, we are handling this.’ The voice, shielded by the greasy, toughened glass,  sounded disembodied, indifferent. 

The police in the carriage was still trying to unhook himself, the vest now pulled to the side,  tightened. It took a few seconds for him to register Carl’s insistent banging on the window,  his reedy cry. 

The police yelped as he watched Charlotte walking steadily away, the thing in her hand  pushing needily against her closed fist. The stab vest snag pulled him sideways, now semi suspended between torn seats and hard gum. 

The thing in her hand was getting larger, transparent strings of light squirming through her  white-tight knuckles; the blurred faces of the passengers oblivious as she moved down the  train. 

The doors of the carriage opened; the police now free of stab vest and stupid hat, just  another angry commuter. 

‘STOP HIM!’ Charlotte paused before exiting the carriage, several interested bodies now  between her and her panting pursuer. 

She exited the train onto the platform and into the crowd. She was ignored, an undesirable  hiding something forbidden, as she walked in a straight line towards the station exit.  Commuters and families parted, looking away without knowing why. 

The thing turned slowly in her tight palm, calming as the bodies thinned, growing as she  shrank away. 

Two streets further and they were alone. She thought about what the area around the train  station would be like in twenty, thirty, forty years from now. There would be no starkly  bleached industrial units, or fenced-off rubble mounds waiting patiently to be rejuvenated.  This would be a place of coffee and co-working (‘Your Home / Your Work’), 6pm drinks, ill-

judged flirtations and unconsidered gifts for unappreciated spouses and their shared, ugly  children. 

Charlotte paused in the jagged shadow cast by a crashed-then-burned-out van, the  blackened metal fading to ancient rust, worthless greenery pushing out from within. 

She opened her hand. 

The thing kept changing shape, pulsing quadrangles and pyramids, spheres then cylinders.  Charlotte tried to fling it from her palm, to smear it against the van, to peel it off her and run  back to the noise, sweat and dirt. Nothing worked; it was like the thing was and was not part  of her. 

On the other side of the road, a middle-aged man paused and looked over expectantly. A  numb pain spread from her hand and along her arm. She spasmed or flinched but couldn’t  tell. The man hesitated then moved on. The pain stopped. The thing had grown a little more,  and she felt weaker. She was aware that ‘she’ had become ‘they’. 

An unfinished cycle lane was their path, littered with the archaeology of work. The  pavements were churned and broken, parched tarmac and concrete dust. As they walked,  the buildings thinned; an occasional boarded-up shop encased by lurid graffiti; epic cocks,  erased phone numbers alongside women’s names, malicious contact details replaced with  more arrows, more numbers, more cocks. 

The arm of the hand that held the thing had got thinner. Charlotte chuckled and thought  about weight-loss programmes and how she could finally be rich. 

They were at the edge of the woodland that cupped the town, like soft hands on a rough  face. Charlotte made herself look at the thing. It was still pulsing mathematically and was  now bigger than her hand, her palm no longer able to close around it. She raised it to her  

face. It was oblivious and needy. The noise of far-away farm machinery soundtracked their  entry into the woods, the cool darkness inviting them inside. 

As they walked, it attached itself to the back of her neck, navigating them purposefully. Birds  muted themselves as they passed. There was no sound, no crack of twig or rustle of leaf,  the air as thick and still as it was outside the painted window of an inherited home. 

They moved deeper into the woods, humanity less and less visible, the rusted metal, tattered  plastic bags and bags of rubble gradually consumed by brown and green and black. 

The path had gone, and they had to force through the walls of foliage and deceptively  caressing tendrils as thorns bit into their shared flesh. The thing was now so big the weight  on her back was making her stoop like the coalman that delivered to her mother every  Friday. She shared a series of images: his black-dusted skin and heavy boots, both welcome  and mysterious. The crashing tumble of delivery, his fading footsteps on the freshly-swilled  path, and the rush to the back door to see him leave. 

Her mother had never met another man after her father died. Her sensual life ended in her  late forties, then forty more years were spent sitting in a cold room, then death. 

Their mingled blood, like signatures smeared on fat leaves. 

Clear light, then a building. 

The trees circled the stone cottage, keeping their distance like men who don’t want to fight.  Charlotte couldn’t think clearly about the undecayed cottage in the welcoming, light-filled  clearing. This wasn’t like in a film, where her mind had melded with an alien consciousness.  It was just fog and instinct as they walked towards the brightly-painted door.

What they’d become was too wide to fit through the entrance. As their intermittently-fused body tried to enter the cold, dusky space the thing moved around Charlotte, temporarily  becoming a limb, or fat or bone, shaping them into a being that could enter together. 

The cottage had the empty soul of a bureaucrat. It sat outside of time in a clearing that  forbade humans, but they were not human. There was one room filled with furniture that was  useless to them. The thing had detached itself and moved back outside into the  timelessness it needed. Charlotte still had the fog, so she lay on the floor and slept. 

She dreamed about her human times. A tattered map of ex-lovers and lost friends, small  objects and vast spaces unfolded inside her, then the dull shine of the coalman’s leather  apron before the gauze of possession drifted over her again.