Aria Remains

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Aria opened her eyes to the weighted blackness of night. Although she could attach neither name nor reason to it, she immediately had the feeling that something was wrong, that something unusual had happened while her consciousness had been occupied elsewhere. It was as though something had been moving close by, trying to be quiet but making just enough sound to disturb her, her sixth sense (of which undeniable proof had only just been established by a lady in Sandhamn, who had been researching the possible links between intuition and perception in porpoises) prickling her skin and prodding insistently at her spine. Her shoulders tensed, her eyes stared straight ahead as they tried to find, and then adjust to, the thin light trembling across the top of the curtains.

There was a sound.

Something downstairs.

At the front door.

She waited, trying to decide what she should do, trying to be as silent as possible so she could focus her attention to the hallway below. For a time all she could hear was the rapid pulsation of blood pumping in her ears and the clamorous rhythm of her breathing. Slowly, carefully, she eased her legs away from the bed, placed her feet onto the carpet as if about to step upon a floor of broken glass and, still listening as hard as she could, she edged towards the bedroom door. The floorboards gave out a pair of small squeaks, annoyed at being disturbed so early in the morning, and the woodworm who had been busy pupating and boring to the timber’s surface all paused as one, squinting upwards with contempt. The door was open just a few inches and she stood close to it, one hand against the frame, her head held stiffly, close enough to the gap to see the darkness of the landing beyond.

She heard another sound, as if someone was trying to open the front door, slowly manipulating its handle, pushing gently against it. Her heart thumping, Aria gradually opened the bedroom door so that she had enough space to squeeze through. Walking on the balls of her feet, avoiding the three sections of landing she knew were also prone to complaining should they bear too great a pressure, she made it to the top bannister of the stairs, carefully grasped it and leaned forward.

She could see a shadow against the frosted glass of the door below. It had no defined shape, nothing to suggest it was even a person, though she knew it had to be, that there was someone trying to get into her home. As she watched, shaking slightly as her panic continued to build, the form seemed almost weightless, as if floating. Still caressing the handle of the door, apparently trying to be as quiet as she, it appeared to widen and then shrink back, grow taller and then shorter again.

Is it smoke? Aria wondered. Can there be a fire outside?

She breathed deeply but smelled nothing to suggest anything was alight.

Biting into her bottom lip, her hand tightly gripping the bannister, she began to take nervous, uncertain steps down the stairs. She felt the ache in her feet, the discomfort of walking on her toes. The closer she got to the door, inching step by step down the stairs, the lighter the shadow appeared and then, quite suddenly, the twisting of the handle ceased, the soft force against the door withdrew and, as Aria was about to step onto the hallway carpet, the withering shape completely disappeared. Walking to the door she reached out a hand and touched the handle, then pressed her palm against the glass. Both felt slightly warm against her skin. Waiting a short while longer, still listening with great concentration, she slowly turned the key in the lock, lowered the handle with care and pulled the door towards her, tilting her head to the side so that she could see outside.

The sun was just beginning to appear to her right, its blurred bright orange light causing her to blink. She scanned the view, looked at the houses on the opposite side of the street, at the fish and chip shop on the corner and the parked cars that shouldn’t have been parked there at all, and then to the narrow bank of thin clouds to her left, but saw no one around, no one who could have been trying to get into her house.

Why would anyone want to come in here? she wondered, stepping through the doorway to see more of the street and the houses and cars, and still saw nobody anywhere, nobody but the small fox who had been visiting her garden of late, who she had noticed was suffering from mange and so had begun treating it with tiny tablets she had received in the mail from an animal charity, scattered across the pouches of dog food she had been leaving outside each night. The fox had paused in the middle of the road, mid-step, watching her carefully until it realised who she was. It then bowed its head in gratitude, as it had started to feel much better and had been able to regrow the fur on its tail and along its back since her caring intervention. Then, assuming there would be no more beef and carrots, or lamb and green beans, forthcoming at this early hour, it shook itself, took one final look at her and then skipped to the opposite pavement, disappearing from sight between a pair of fences.

Satisfied that no one had been trying to break into her house, and knowing the fox wouldn’t have bothered being so stealthy if it had wanted to come in since it knew it only had to knock at the door for an invitation, almost immediately she allowed the memory of the incident to drift from her mind. Knowing there was now no point in attempting to get back to sleep, she instead equipped the coffee pot and sat on a chair at the kitchen table, rubbing her brow and wondering what she might do with the day. Unusually she had no plans, nothing she could think of that needed to be made, no designs that needed to be edited or listed for sale and, as she considered it further, she found no real inclination to do any kind of work at all. Whereas before she had felt dull and listless, this morning she found an element of hope inside her, although she couldn’t think of anything that should make her feel that way. It was as though she were in a vacuum, waiting without apprehension, feeling idle without otiosity.

She drank her coffee and watched the light of the new day develop. The sky became a glorious pale blue, the sun beat down through the trees that edged her garden and cast beautifully twisted shadows across the grass and the air grew warmer. Thinking of nothing in particular, she began to feel herself drawn close to the atmosphere, becoming intimate with the world. A boisterous group of birds arrived outside her window, sparrows and starlings taking turns at the several feeders hanging from the trees, and a pair of white butterflies danced and skittered around the buddleia for a long time. She made another pot of coffee, allowing each cup to become lukewarm before drinking it. She felt unhurried, content in the awareness that she wasn’t expected to go anywhere or do anything else. It will come, she found herself thinking. The things waiting for me, whatever they are, will come. There is no need for me to try to find them. They will find their own way here.

Without consideration of how long she had been sitting at her kitchen table, she was mildly surprised to see the time on the screen of her phone when it awakened, Ruby’s smiling photo urgently vibrating.

‘Hello, Ruby,’ she said, her voice relaxed, almost dream-like.

‘Aria. Oh, god, Aria. Have you heard? Are you okay?’

‘Have I heard what?’

Still she felt sedate, not allowing Ruby her full concentration as she watched a squirrel bounce and hop across the garden, assuming she was calling to tell her that some singer or movie star had done something stupid, that they’d been caught in flagrante delicto, or that another member of parliament had been caught with his hand in the proverbial till. I must get out there and cut the lawn, she thought, the squirrel at a standstill now swallowed by the protracted grass.

‘Sam,’ Ruby replied.

She sounded anxious and upset. Aria, continuing to be little more than a bystander in the conversation, not picking up Ruby’s tone, took a breath and looked into her cup.

‘Oh, no,’ she said casually, ’I haven’t heard from him yet. Don’t panic. I mean, wasn’t I supposed to call him?’

‘You haven’t heard, have you?’

She took a sip of her coffee.

‘Heard what?’

‘Aria,’ Ruby said, her voice now forceful, almost desperate.

‘What, Ruby? What is it?’

‘I have something terrible to tell you.’

Suddenly Aria’s heart paused, her mind transporting her instantly back to the terrible morning just a few days before, when Ruby had stated a conversation in a very similar way.

When she had told her about Robert.

‘Oh, god, what’s happened?’ Aria asked, now fully connected to the conversation, not sure she really wanted to know the answer. ‘It is Josh? Has something happened to Josh?’

‘No, it’s…’ Ruby said, breathing deeply. ’It’s Sam. Oh, Aria, I’m so sorry.’

Aria quickly got to her feet, the action sending her mug to the floor. It broke into only three pieces, the handle detaching but otherwise remaining intact, the body splitting apart so that the coffee was set free, spreading across the vinyl tiles and running along the channels between them like affluents searching for their main stem. As it went it inadvertently drowned a gathering of fungus gnats who had been taking a break from flying around, minding their own business, then pooled at the step of the back door, ashamed of itself.

’No!’ Aria shouted into the phone, ignorant of the massacre at her feet. ‘Oh no, no….’

‘I’m so sorry, sweetie,’ Ruby said. ‘So sorry. Look, I’m coming right over.’

‘No, no,’ Aria said again, all other words escaping her, useless to her, then fell onto her chair, leaned across the kitchen table and began to gently weep.

How could this be? What was happening? How had she suddenly turned into some kind of involuntary black widow?

It occurred to her, as her tears subsided, surprising her that they had concluded so soon, that she was thinking more of herself than she was of Sam, about what his sudden loss meant to her. It brought her a feeling of disgust, a sensation of nausea that this should be the case but, no matter how much she tried to dam these insensitive and selfish thoughts, she had to admit that it was true, that it was how she was feeling. She had liked Sam, had found him interesting and funny, but she had experienced none of the attraction, the magnetism towards him that had so consumed her when she had met Robert. He had been the one, she was even more sure now and, despite the way it made her feel about herself, almost to the point that she didn’t even recognise who she was, she could not evade the thoughts of him, about what the two of them might have become.

It seemed only a few seconds more before Ruby arrived, knocking urgently at the front door. Aria dragged herself upright, pulling a sheet of kitchen roll from its holder and blowing her nose as she walked along the hallway and opened the door. Ruby immediate grabbed her and pulled her into an embrace, holding her tightly.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she said, holding the back of Aria’s head.

‘It’s okay,’ Aria said, sniffing loudly and moving away. ‘I’m okay.’

‘Are you?’ Ruby said with suspicion, looking at her closely.

Aria nodded, blew her nose again into the folded sheet of kitchen roll and then led Ruby into the kitchen. She pulled several more sheets of paper from their roll and bent to tidy up the broken mug and mop the coffee from the floor, shaking her head when Ruby offered to help.

‘Honestly,’ she said, standing and dropping the cold, saturated coffee-dyed sheets into the flip-top bin, catching Ruby’s expression of deep concern, ‘I’m okay. I mean, I am upset, of course, but it’s not the same as…’

‘As Robert?’ Ruby said knowingly, sitting at the table and indicating for Aria to join her.

Aria nodded, sat at the opposite side of the table and then reached across it, taking hold of Ruby’s hands.

‘Does that make me an absolutely hideous person?’ she asked, biting her lip. ‘Does that make me some kind of hideous old witch, some self-obsessed sociopath, more concerned with myself than with someone who’s just died?’

Ruby frowned and took a deep breath. ‘No,’ she said, her tone suggesting that it was something less than a definite no. ‘It doesn’t make you anything of the sort, course it doesn’t, but, well, he didn’t just die.’

‘What do you mean?’ Aria asked, wiping her face before returning her hand to Ruby’s.

‘Well, it sounds like… and I only know this because Joe phoned to tell me, but… well, it wasn’t just that he died. It sounds like he was killed, that he was stabbed, just like Robert was.’

Aria felt as though someone had slapped her across the face. So concerned was she with her own feelings, and whether those feelings had shown her to be a terrible person, she hadn’t even thought about what might have happened to this poor man.

‘Oh, my god,’ she whispered slowly, reclaiming her hands and resting her face between them.

‘Yes, I know,’ Ruby said, ‘it’s awful,’

‘No, I mean, he was killed, too? Stabbed?’ She shook her head as Ruby looked at her in confusion. ‘No, what I mean to say is, yes, it is terrible, of course it is, he was a perfectly nice and kind man and, who knows, we might’ve gone out again at some point or whatever, but…’ She paused, thinking about how to align her thoughts so she could then put them into words. ‘He was stabbed, Ruby. Just like Robert. Meets me, goes out with me, then immediately gets stabbed to death. I mean, what are the chances? What’s the likelihood of something like that happening randomly?’

‘What do you mean?’ Ruby asked, surprising Aria at her unusual lack of interpretation.

‘What I mean,’ Aria replied, her voice still quiet, her words coming slowly, ‘is that it can’t be a coincidence, can it? It just can’t be. There has to be something else happening here. Either I’ve suddenly become the most dangerous, most poisonous woman in the world, the very antithesis of a good date, or there’s someone killing these poor guys for the one and only simple reason that they showed an interest in me. I mean, what else could it be?’

Ruby shook her head but, as Aria noted, since it was something that happened less often than a significant asteroid impact, she remained silent. It made her recall a lyric sung by a band that, when she was sixteen, she had loved almost more than life itself: passivity equals compliance.

She allowed several moments of silence to pass, then asked, ‘You think so, too, don’t you?’

Ruby appeared as if she were about to answer and then, apparently deciding better of it, stopped herself, shaking her head.

‘Come on,’ Aria said, ’think about it. There’s no real chance that something like this would happen by accident, is there? There has to be something weird going on here. There must be…′

She broke away with a shudder, her thoughts suddenly rearranging themselves again so that the thing she hadn’t yet fully considered pushed itself to the front of her consciousness.

‘Oh, god, I must have a stalker,’ she said, her voice now a whisper again. ‘There must be someone watching me, someone who doesn’t want me to be happy. Someone so twisted, so monstrous that they’ll resort to murder just to keep me from being happy. But why? Who could it be?’

‘Have you noticed anyone around, anyone who’s been acting strangely?’ Ruby asked at last. Aria recognised that she agreed with her, that she, too, thought this foul work had been committed by the hand of just one person.

She thought about the man, the mysterious man who was always around, who she had been seeing almost everywhere she went, but almost immediately decided he had no role to play. That was just a coincidence, she thought, and besides, as far as she knew he hadn’t even seen her. It would have been more likely for him to have reported her for stalking, for following him with nefarious intent, if he had any idea who she was.

Aside from him, whoever he was, she could think of no one else she had seen, had been aware of no indication that anyone had been watching her, waiting for her, willing to kill for her just so they… but, just so they what? What did they think, if such a twisted, deluded person existed, was going to happen? That she would rush into their open arms, grateful for the lengths to which they were willing to go, the risks they were willing to take just to have her all to themselves? That she would fall in love with this murderer, this destroyer of chance, of hope?

‘No,’ she said. ‘There’s no one, no one I can think of at all.’

Ruby looked towards the ceiling, then said, ‘Well, maybe it’s not that. Maybe there’s some link between the two of them, between Robert and Sam, that has something to do with it. Maybe it’s not about you at all, but it’s about them.’

‘But Robert didn’t know anyone - he said so himself. You know he had only just moved here, that he had hardly been out, had hardly met anyone apart from us and Josh.’

Ruby shook her head again, then stood and moved to the coffee machine.

‘Do you have any more mugs?’ she asked, and both managed a small smile.

‘I think there’s one in the cupboard that I haven’t broken yet,’ Aria told her.

’Look, if there has been no one watching you, stalking you, which I suppose is quite unlikely…′

‘Oh, thanks,’ Aria interrupted, checking the floor in case she had missed any fragments of porcelain.

‘You know what I mean. You would have noticed if there was someone being weird around you.’

’Yes, but isn’t that the whole thing about stalkers? Their whole shtick? That they keep themselves out of the way, out of sight?′

Ruby half nodded, half shrugged, then said, ‘Well, okay, but it is pretty improbable. I mean, you hardly leave the house anyway, and when you do it’s just to come mine.’

‘Yes,’ Aria admitted, ‘sad but true.’

As Ruby prepared the coffee she suggested that, perhaps, they could investigate the situation, that they might find an answer, but admitted Aria was right in her postulation that it was probably something best left to the police.

‘Even if they won’t know enough to consider the fact that both of them knew you, I’m sure they’ll find out what they need to know.’

‘Do you think they’ll want to talk to me about it?’ Aria asked, as the question struck her like the ringing of a clock, making her feel nervous.

Ruby considered the likelihood, then said, ‘Maybe if they do make that connection, but it’s pretty doubtful. If they had found your number in Robert’s phone, or thought it was relevant, they would probably have called you by now, anyway, just to see who you are.’

‘I suppose so,’ Aria agreed.

Later, when Ruby had left to start preparing fajitas, having asked Aria to join them and then, after her polite refusal, telling her to phone her if she needed to talk to her about anything at all, Aria suddenly became overwhelmed by a great languor and, still unable to think of anything she should do, she went upstairs and laid on her bed. After several moments trying to make herself comfortable she became aware of something beneath her pillow. Sitting up to investigate, she gasped as she discovered a small stone bottle, dark brown in colour with some kind of engravings upon it.

She rubbed her face and, with some effort, took the bottle to the window so that she might gain a better view of it. Holding it towards the light she saw a twisted, grimacing face moulded into it while, just below, was a circle that had what looked like eight leaves or flower petals reaching out from its centre. As she held it closer to her face she began to sense that it smelled of something unpleasant and, raising it to her nose, she gagged as she recognised the odour. It was urine. Definitely urine, sharp and strong.

She threw the bottle onto the bed, wiping a finger under her nose. As it landed on the duvet she heard a rattle, as though there was something inside it and, picking it up again, shaking it vigorously, she guessed it must contain something like pins or tacks.

But where did it come from? She knew that she had never seen it before, but also knew that no one could have been in her bedroom without her knowledge to place it under her pillow. So where…?

Then she remembered the noises the night before, the smoky shadow outside her door. But there had been nobody there, she told herself. And even if there had been, there was no way they could have come inside, no way for them to have come into her bedroom and place this strange little bottle beneath her pillow, under her head, without her knowing. Was there?

She thought back to her night out with Sam, trying to recall if he had, for some reason, thought it a charming thing to do, gifting her a small stone bottle filled with urine and pins. Why would he do something like that? Had he been brought up by a family of weirdos, and this was how they expressed their interest to a woman? Was that even a thing?

How drunk had she actually been? Drunk enough to have been given this peculiar artefact, place it beneath her pillow and then forget everything about it?

She shook her head. It was too much to think about, too difficult to find an answer to such an impossible set of questions. She was too tired, had too many other things jamming her mind, had such sadness in her heart that the origins of this bizarre little bottle would just have to wait. Maybe she would remember once she had properly rested, once these dreadful days were behind her.

She placed the bottle on the windowsill and got back onto the bed. As she closed her eyes, feeling the weight of her body as she sunk into the mattress, she thought of Sam and of Robert, wondering what it was she could possibly have done to inflict such misery upon both them and herself. Why it was she was being punished so. In the moments before sleep finally pulled her away from the day she wondered, what will become of me? Doomed to be alone forever, cursed, damaged goods, a broken woman who is just no good to anybody…