VII
The city centre was not as busy
as it had been, but Hazel had anticipated that. The shops had all closed and where the streets had been filled
with people trying to buy last minute Christmas presents, they were now
sprinkled with groups of drunken students looking for a cheap drink, oil
workers looking for some light relief during the festive season and groups of
more mature women looking for something to do after a game of bingo. There were work parties too, no doubt,
filling the hotels and restaurants with drunken accounts of office gossip.
Hazel had had hers a couple of
weeks back and it had been as awful as she had expected. She had drunk too much and made a fool of
herself. She was sure there were still
people in her office who laughed at her when she walked past.
Well, no more. She wasn’t going to drink again, of that she
was sure. There was the baby to think
about now and… and a sense that she needed to be particularly pure. As she made her way along the freezing high
street, dodging staggering revellers, she found herself looking at them with
disgust. How could they let
themselves get like this? she
wondered. The city is so vulnerable now, so pathetic. She felt her contempt grow.
She wasn’t sure where she was
going, didn’t have any plan. She was
following her instincts – maternal instincts – which told her she was going the
right way. She half waddled, half
staggered down the street, still getting used to the beautiful, but unexpected
burden which had blossomed within her. Perhaps
she looked drunk herself. Most mothers
had months to get used to being pregnant.
By Hazel’s reckoning she had had a few hours at most.
She passed bars with neon
signs; clubs that bled bass beats; the homeless clinging to their granite
corners, paper cups in hand; churches turned to casinos. She saw it all and felt a coldness seeping
inside her that had nothing to do with the freezing night. It all has to change, she realised,
the world is broken and needs to be fixed.
She crossed the street, found
her way onto a back alley with a few bars and take-away restaurants of its own. Here the noise of the city seemed to peel
away, muted by shop fronts. Seagulls
wheeled overhead, or stared from the top of rubbish bins and streetlamps. Once she saw one overhead, its wings spread
wide whilst its body was obscured by the head of a lamp, so it seemed only
light and feathered pinions. They’re
my angels, she thought.
Eventually the alley opened
into a wider street, with a miniature plaza of concrete marking the entrance to
a tiny, upmarket (and consequently half-abandoned) shopping centre to her
right. A table of polished granite sat
in the middle and for some reason she knew this was what she had come for. She made her way towards it, expecting a
sense of ceremony and feeling disappointed at its lack. When she reached it she could only stare at
it for a while, gazing across its smooth black surface, wondering whether the
artist who had sculpted it had any notion of how it might play a role in this
strange night.
It looked cool. A thin skin of frost was starting form
across it.
I want to touch it, she
realised.
Carefully, trying not to
overbalance with the dramatic change in her centre of gravity which pregnancy
had brought, she took another step forward, then reached down, ever-so-slowly,
ever-so-gingerly, until her hand was a hair’s breadth from the stone and then-
Entrails. Carcass cut open. Blood oozing out to spill down the granite and break all the
lines. Patterns in chalk. Knife in hand, still dripping. Drip.
Drip. Ripples. Reflections. Bisections of sky framed by ribbons of flesh. Drip. Drip.
Distortion. Transformation. Whorls of light and space and time. Visions.
Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Gone.
-she staggered backwards,
almost falling as she pushed away from the sculpture.
“Hey, love, are you alright?” a
voice called out across the street.
When Hazel turned around to stare at the woman who had spoken it,
revealing both her confusion and her fear, the woman tsked, “You shouldn’t be
drinking, the state you’re in. Get a
taxi and go home, for Christ’s sake!”
The woman turned and made her
way down the hill, away from the city centre, towards the quiet streets.
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