“I didn’t think you were serious,” Leah said, enjoying the burn as she climbed the embankment. They’d been walking all day. “So what am I looking for, just a big cat? Have you brought binoculars?”

She looked across at Jon, saddled with gear, a map slung across his walking coat in a waterproof cover. Perhaps she hadn’t needed to ask that question.

“We’re not really looking for the Beast. It’s the wrong location and, besides, pretty unlikely given the breeding conditions.”

“So what are we doing up a mountain in the freezing cold when we could be in the pub? Or better yet, in bed? And why did I get up at the crack of dawn to drive down to Cornwall when we have cold high mountains fairly close to Manchester?”

“Well, it’s more of a hilltop isn’t it really? I wanted you to see the stone circle.”

“Well, it’s more of a line than a circle isn’t it really?” She grinned.

He grabbed hold of her and pulled her near the stones, the wind cutting her face with coldness, the views spiralling out, the rest of the world like some huge open space. Possibilities. And they were stood there, next to a Bronze Age monument, as he told her later, just two dots on a landscape.

“When I see something like this,” Jon said, his hands locked around her back, “and I feel the depth of history, I realise the importance of the present, and this moment.”

He spoke, at times, with a curious syntax, or choosing unexpected descriptions, those slightly out of the ordinary. The way Raleigh did. The large rocks on Vik beach reared up into her mind. The depth of history.

Jon sneaked his thumbs underneath her jumper, shocking her warm skin with his cold touch, hooking her back to the now.

“I want these moments with you to last as long as these stones.”

She stopped being thoughtful, smiled and met his mouth.

They circled around each other in the inn later, warming their bodies with scalding showers, taking turns for the shower, the toothpaste. There was something of the forever about it, as if they’d been doing this all their lives. They made love, labouring under heavy blankets, her hair wet on the pillow, her skin, unsure of which was water and which was sweat. They slept and found each other again. It seemed like it would never change.

She placed the recycled cardboard cup of green tea with cranberry on the little nook inside the lectern. Her lips were burning. Clicking the remote she started up the projection screen and inserted her USB. The lecture theatre was freezing as always and she tightened the straps on the ballet-style cardigan wrapped around her middle, wishing she’d worn a jumper, as the system loaded.

The motorway reminded her of a black sand beach. Vik beach in Iceland. The memory of the water whirling, roaring, spitting in the darkness like some colossal machine. The pinch of salt in her nose, throat and lungs that is the same the world over. She and Raleigh walking hand in hand along the shoal, admiring the massive rocks adjacent to the tide. Those monumental rocks, like statues. Guardians. Nature’s soldiers. And then how Raleigh had disappeared; business. Always business in strange locations. And how she had been left, feet aching, bending over the rocks as she walked along the shore, traipsing black sand and peering out into the night as her hair blew behind her, arms fastened against the chill.

Leah crossed her arms over her still-damp dress. She would not ask for the heating to be turned up, nor would she give Raleigh the satisfaction by rubbing the gooseflesh from her bare arms.

Staring straight ahead, beyond the feathers of the driver’s grey shaggy cut, she watched the white strips zip past them, charting their progress, cutting down the miles between the Mercedes and the airport, she licked her lips and said, “Jon was a much better lover than you. Funny what a few different strands of DNA can do.” She turned to face Raleigh, colliding with the startling, almost alien ice of his blue eyes.

His eyes narrowed, and his jaw set into a familiar position, his hand wound back the way she had seen it do many times before. She forced herself not to close her eyes as he struck her and not to fight. Remaining still, she thought, would amplify the wrongness of his action. But Raleigh didn’t work like that.

“You do realise,” he said, “that you said ‘was’.”

A few tears peeled from her eyes. She gritted her teeth, telling herself it was purely from the shock of his smack.

“Now Leah, I want you to imagine that before you is a television screen. The age you identified as having one of the most difficult experiences of your life is 28. I want you to imagine that on that screen, when I say, is that experience. But as we’ve discussed before, it is your analytical self that is watching the screen, standing over the shoulder of your emotional self. You won’t be hurt by what you are seeing. Now, when you’re ready, play the film of that experience in its entirety, being watched by your analytical self. When you’ve done that, I’d like you to say ‘yes’.”

The knife scratched coarsely over slightly burned toast. Morning soaked the kitchen table and she thought of herself naked on it. She knew Jon remembered the dream, that to him there had been an unusual quality about it; that he wanted to ask her if she was okay, but was hesitant. Which was why it was taking light years to make their breakfast.

She left him to it, looking out onto a narrow concrete back yard the size of a hat box. A bike rested against one fence, a pair of old trainers that looked so large, worn and deformed they reminded her of plaster casts of feet. She imagined him cycling around the streets of London while she was going about her life in Manchester, him checking the roads for traffic as she bought decaff in the vegetarian cafe, him propelling forward into the park as she set her briefcase on the lectern before a maw of students, coffee cooling. Leah turned back to the flat, comfortably untidy and strewn with books and clothes. She peered into the thin glass ant colony on the warm oak bookcase near the back door. Saw no signs of life. Next to it was a pair of bobbly grey gloves and his house keys, complete with a keyring blaring the slogan, geologists take you to the park, zoologists take you to the zoo, cryptozoologists take you to places you never dreamed existed.

She rolled her eyes and plucked a book out that caught her eye, shiny, crawling with pictures of ants, but also because it had his name on it.

“You did this?”

He looked up from the toast. The kettle clicked, steam rolling in clouds under the cupboard. She thought about the condensation, the maybe mould growing underneath because of that.

He wiped his fingers on his jeans and came over to her, barefoot and bare-chested. He looked Nordic in the sunshine. He was lean and she liked the definition of his shoulders, although it was probably the kind of definition that comes from not looking after himself properly, so absorbed in work. A pair of glasses rested near the kettle. She wanted to see him reading or working in the evening or on a lazy Sunday, glasses on, the radio in the background. Maybe a cat.

He handed her a plate of black toast.

“You alright this morning?”

She shrugged. “Course.” She bit a corner of toast and tasted the blackness. Munching, straightening Jon’s oversized t-shirt to better cover her backside, she found a seat at the small table next to the bookcase. “You look Danish.”

Jon pushed her hair back over her shoulder and looked at her seriously. The action was so unusually considerate she felt embarrassed. She pushed the other piece of toast around on the plate and pulled one foot up onto the chair. “Leah?”

She cleared her throat. “I’m fine. I don’t sleep well sometimes.”

He paused, then went to make the tea. She heard the mugs filling with water, spoon clinking.

They sat at opposite ends of the table, much more of a distance between them than before she had kept something from him. She drew a much-needed sip of tea. He’d made it sugary, which she ordinarily went without, but the sweetness pepped her up after the rough sleep. But she couldn’t tell him. She imagined what would happen if she did. Her mind was suddenly full of elaborate sand castles falling down, sand raining to the ground, and the landscape, previously intricate and built-up becoming flat. Becoming desert.

Click.

“…Lima, Echo, Alfa, Hotel… Kilo, India, November, Golf. Over.”

Click.

“Dr King. Leah? Hello? Can you hear me, madam?”

The radio crackled, a tinny voice mumbling. Leah tried to focus on the blurred figure before her. Her head screamed with pain. Her pulse tripped, a circuit about to short. She tried to sit. Why was it so hard to move? Move. Get up.

Her hand squawked, slipping across what she now realised to be tiles. She clunked backwards, hit her head on something jutting and blunt. There was water all over the floor. She raised her hand, an attempt to ease the pressure in her skull. Her hands were tacky. That smell. What - ? Her eyes bulged. Blood.

The Mercedes sloughed off the last dregs of traffic from the A4 out of Hammersmith. The M4 widened out, the vehicle travelling so smoothly it was almost aquaplaning over the motorway. Too fast. Too sure of itself.

Raleigh was watching her, in that owl-like manner of his. Even his eyes, which were so light brown they could warm to amber if struck right, had a curious intelligence, as if he knew things she couldn’t. She looked at him directly, bearing the force of his emotionless eyes, and lightning glittered dimly in the night beyond the tinted windows.

“Let’s get this straight, Raleigh, I’m here for Jon. Where is he?”

He laughed, and took it as a queue to sit back. His withholding was an example of how he functioned, how their relationship had been; control.

……..

As the Mercedes sharked past traffic in the fast lane, it clicked where they were going: Heathrow.

Leah cycled around the back of the Central Library and cuffed her bike’s wheel to the back of a bench, fingers stiff from the October cold. Late. She plucked her files from the bike’s basket and pulled off her beret as she entered the library. The man on the desk nodded at her as she shook out her hair and rushed down the stairs.

Members of the Association of Women in Education (AWE) were already gathered at a table downstairs in the cafe. The Library Theatre used to operate out of here, so there was always a dramatic air about the place.

Through the soundtrack of thoughts about the upcoming meeting – had she remembered the minutes from the last one, she’d printed out details on her next project to share with the group, hadn’t she? Yes, they were in the file - she glimpsed a memory of Raleigh, from before. The memory crested, sun-bright and intense.

New York, the Palace. She’d arrived with another man and left with Raleigh.

…………

She wrestled up and out of sleep. Wrenching out of the man’s grasp. It was not happening again. Someone was hold of her. But it was just the blankets, entangled around her limbs. Only when she’d hit the mat next to her bed did she properly realise where she was. Gasping, swallowing, squeezing her eyes tight shut, she ground the heel of her palm into her chest. It hurt. Her pulse flickered against her hand, delicate as a trapped butterfly. She stank of sweat. Wiping her face, she felt around for her phone and checked the time: 3.43am. Mind whirring, she knew it was pointless getting back to bed. Besides, the sheets were soaked. She forced herself up and yanked the cord for the shower. Water hit the glass screen. She stripped off.

…………..

W1, where all the publishers sat in their white buildings and offices with glass signs, was close to Soho. Belting her red coat tight, Leah dodged the bulleting rain, making a bee-line for Soho which was close by. London at 9.30am was markedly different from the panic attack of pre 9am work stress. Hordes of dark-suited men and women with tight, slicked hairstyles and power shoes carpeted the streets. Now, it felt like the street sweepers and bin collectors were playing leisurely with the space they had left behind.

She found an unassuming, non-chain coffee shop, stocked with a couple of smiley Polish waitresses and a decent list of herbal teas. A folksy female singer was quietly pouring her heart out over the radio. It was the type of place Raleigh wouldn’t have been seen dead in.

……………

 “I’m a researcher, Mr Oliver. And this is an alternative, much more accessible way of exploring our academic motives,” she said, patting the froth in the cappuccino she wouldn’t drink – she didn’t do caffeine – and setting the tiny spoon down with a tink. “As you have just pointed out, people are interested in me.”

“Yes, but is this what you want them to know?”

“And why should I hide?”

The underground smelled damp, of other people’s wet clothes, rain mouldering in wool coats. Leah took in lungfuls of stale air, tasting dust. She breathed away the tension of the meeting. The shame was inside her, hot and dark, other people’s reactions gathered in her like sludge. Victim. This is what they thought. A woman who has been raped is essentially weak. Leah King was a strong and prominent academic who just happened to date movie stars and that sold books. A few newspapers on the platform fluttered in the carriage’s wake and then were quiet.

Footsteps behind her. Leah tensed. She replayed all those early mornings she had forced her body through five mile runs before work, the control she felt, the strength. She’d be okay, if anyone started.

But it was that guy, the Sylvia Plath guy.

………..

They were in the same queue for coffee, the same queue at Marks and Spencer where they both picked up a copy of The Guardian, they looked around the food court for a table to sit; there was just one.

He pointed with his coffee, shrugging the unspoken question.

She laughed. “Sure.”

“Could have bought one paper between us,” he said.

“Saved the environment?”

“Saved ourselves from all the bad news.”

There was a pause in which they looked at each other, and something unspoken, something that couldn’t be said, passed between them.

Leah pressed her lips together, curbing her smile.

He’d asked her to guess what he did. Unfair, really, given what he said when her guesses ran out. Cryptozoology. Basically, he had said, I study animals that don’t exist.

How’s that going for you, she’d said.

Laughter. And you?

She told him she was a lecturer, specialising in feminism and film. She pointed out he didn’t screw his face up when she said feminism. A lot of people consider it a dirty word, she’d said.

I know far dirtier words. He’d actually flushed after that, and apologised.

You know, he’d said, after they’d fallen quiet, suddenly aware of the wall of sound around them; train announcements and machines beeping, people talking importantly on their phones, a young couple kissing in the corner, I read a brilliant book by a woman who looks remarkably like you. She’s not quite as beautiful as you, obviously.

Leah toyed with her coffee cup, pulling the plastic cap on and off.

“Well, I should get my train. Long journey to Scotland.”

“Oh? Looking for Nessie?”

“I’ll keep my eye out. No, conference.”

“Well, good luck.”

“Thank you.”

“And you’re heading?”

“Home to Manchester, but looks like I’m on the train after you.”

He nodded, standing now and seeming reluctant to leave. He turned, then turned back. “Have a safe journey.”

She smiled. “You too.” And then she watched him walk away. She thought about him finding his seat, and wondered if she would be in his thoughts as the train drew him up the country, her following just behind.

Around thirty minutes later, when she found the crossword section, she discovered he’d filled in 2 across: Fashion leader (11). How had he done that without her noticing? She peered at the boxes; a row of numbers in each of the white squares. His handwriting was sloppy and seemed somehow old-fashioned. What did it mean? Was it some cryptic puzzle? She looked at the 5 again and it reminded her a lot of the way her dad used to write them, the very top like a lid raised, or someone doffing their cap. Next to the row of digits he’d scribbled a note – a scientist’s scrawl: In case you have more trouble with the barriers! J.

It was flattering, but she folded the paper in half, shoved it into her briefcase and went to check the departure boards. J. Besides, what was with the J? How could she call someone up and ask for an initial?

…

She met him in the place that it had happened. The place her life had paused, broken, and become not the same.

London Euston at rush hour. Passengers spewed forward from the dead silence of the stopped train. As she waited to get off, Leah kept the space she liked to keep from the suit in front of her. Somehow, the man behind got the message too. These days, there was always a bubble around Leah King that people did not press.

A staccato of heels and boots drummed as they climbed the slope away from the platforms. She walked on the fringe of people, making better progress. She was heading out of the main exit when they crossed paths, negotiating the web of people, each shooting off in their own directions. He was about a metre away when she clocked his trajectory. His coming towards her made her uncomfortably aware of her legs, hips, the line of her body, the fact that her posture was too straight, her face too flat of emotion, the eyes limp. And she was aware of her reaction to him, the way you feel when someone excites you by their familiarity, because they are just what you would look for. She scowled, almost furious. How dare there be someone that could do that to her, still.

When she blinked, behind the black of her yes, she still saw the blackness on her body. The bruises that had stained her skin, long after. The shame that it had engrained in her.

Eyes open, passing the man, she set her face to impassive, eyes narrowing automatically. She caught the start of it, but didn’t get time to witness all the shock on his face. By then they had crossed and he was heading for the escalators towards the tube. His puzzled expression was another image that remained behind her eyes, like an aftershock.

Outside, heat cloaked the city. Sound choked her ears. The sun was too bright, pinging off cars with people sweating inside, music thumping, tinny. Her sleeveless blouse stuck to her chest, despite its cotton. She switched her briefcase to the other hand, enjoying the maneouvring of muscle. This new strength, her obsession with her body, did not stop her from inching to the left when a tall man joined her at the crossing. Coward. When he scissored through the plugged traffic – cabs rolling forwards, a siren starting almost out of earshot and weaving ever closer – she relaxed. She looked around for the ambulance and spotted the lights, epileptic blue. It veered off in another direction, revealing the intermittent zip of a pneumatic drill buzzing into brick.

Green. She walked.

*

The university office where she checked in was like a library, quiet and a welcome shelter from the noise and heat. Sweat stung her top lip, she did her breathing exercises to calm down.I am calm, I am strong, I am in charge.

The student manning the desk was at the age where women terrified him. She gave him a tight smile, the pen scored the paper as she signed her name and her university. He handed her a badge and a conference programme.

“Thank you, Dr King. They’re waiting for you. Good luck.”

I am calm, I am strong, I am in charge. 

I am calm, I am strong, I am in charge.

Leah listened to her heels hitting the stage, aware of everything. Ten steps from the podium. The eyes of the audience in their stalls, on her. Not unfriendly, just bored. People chatting and sipping water, flipping through their programmes. Not quite settled. She blinked: bruises behind her eyes. She blinked again: the face of the man in the train station.

 Focus. I am calm, I am strong…

“Good morning, everybody.” Her voice was mellow and pleasant, drawing people’s attention. She paused, waiting, pulse slowing now she was here, waiting until she knew she had everyone’s attention. “It’s such a pleasure to be here and I’d like to thank the organisers for inviting me to be the keynote speaker. I do apologise for keeping you waiting. I am confident, however, that this conference will have been worth the wait. All of the abstracts are fascinating, and I am particularly looking forward to the Dr Townsend’s discussion of fashion and film. Perhaps if I’d asked for an advanced copy, I would have thought twice before wearing these heels.”

Laughter rippled through the auditorium.

“Not wishing to converge on Dr Townsend’s territory, I have to say how interesting it has been to see the plethora of Hollywoodisations of heritage film in the last decade. What is it that fuels our current obsession with the past? Have we simply swapped corsets for heels? If we are the daughters of The Movement, then what of the granddaughters? What lies ahead for women and, most importantly, is that future bright?”

*

In the refreshments area, Leah held a warm orange juice against her grey shift dress, one arm belted across her middle. All the pleasantries and fake enthusiasm for other people’s research had left her feeling like she’d eaten M&Ms all day. The arches of her feet ached. As she surveyed the cloud of lecturers, students and professors, many of which she had known and worked with over the years, she thought how much she hated being there. At thirty, she was in no position to be a keynote speaker, there were far better researchers, those better able to articulate their theories, those researching far more pertinent topics behind closed doors. But, as her editor said, she had a face for TV. And that was the problem. It had seemed a good idea at first, a way to get her voice heard and her book read, but the book was premature and her opinions, three years later, wildly different. 

What stood out about the guy was a froth of ginger beard.

“I read your book Dr King,”

It always started like this.

“Oh?”

“Yes, I have to say, I disagree with some of your conclusions.”

Oh good.

“Well that’s what it’s there for. Comprehension results from confusion, and argument. And conclusions are simply there to give structure to essays, they are nevertheless intended to be fluid. If you’ll excuse me, I need a drink.”

His eyes went to her full glass of juice.

She turned her back at the drinks counter and pretended to be topping up. She was something of a celebrity, it was true. Her first book had come off the back of her PhD thesis, her celebrity had come out of a handful of chance meetings, and the fact that she had been just twenty seven and a feminine feminist. There was much misrepresentation of what constituted feminism, or post-feminism, still. So there was this double-bind; the academics loved to have her here because her name commanded attention, drew in delegates who wanted to be on the same bill, but who could feel secretly smug that they were real academics. But she was more than that, she knew, and she would demonstrate that with her new book. The book that kept her publishers up at night, twitching, seeing their investment in her dive-bomb. And yet, she was confident. This needed to be said. If they wouldn’t publish it, she’d find someone who would.

Was this the reason they had targeted her, this mock celebrity? She pushed away images of the attack. After months and months with a therapist, she had control over this now.

Her thoughts lapped away from the conference to the man at the station. Was he on a train? Or were the doors hissing as he stepped off a tube? Why had he even stuck in her mind, a symbol of possibilities always missed, or something else? She sipped, and tasted sour orange, tangy and with bits.

The ginger froth was approaching again, obviously wanting to get entangled in a heated debate.

A voice shouted over the general buzz of chatter; they were going back in. She took her chance to lose herself in the crowd.

*

Leah avoided the tube and walked from UCL, away from the well-painted doors with brass plaques above them, beaming about people she should, but didn’t know, and beating a straight path into Chinatown. She always felt at home there. In Chinatown, the men weren’t interested in you; you became invisible. As she walked, zig-zagging through the herd of people, she felt her spine soften. She was becoming herself again, not Dr Leah King, post-feminist, ungrateful daughter of The Movement keynote speaker, best-selling author, once dated a movie star, academic sell-out. She was whoever she wanted to be.

In the bobbing sea of Oriental faces, she slowed and looked into the shop windows and displays, onto a different culture. One that had perhaps been modified by English commodities, but different nonetheless. She admired the pink paper umbrellas in buckets outside shops, the lanterns. Ducks and various other animals she couldn’t recognise were skewered in shop windows, their skin painted red.

*

She spooned salty soup into her mouth, one hand checking her Outlook messages on the notebook on the restaurant’s table. All the other delegates would be having a meal together, getting drunk, falling into each other’s hotel rooms. But she wasn’t lonely, she had too much work for that.

A taller than average, smiling waiter came over to ask how the soup was. He had a Mancunian accent.

She dabbed her mouth. “Lovely, thank you.”

The napkin kept the imprint of her lips, deep pink and slightly apart.

She remembered the hotel room with Raleigh. Its heavy flocked wallpaper, so thick it reminded her of Edwardian doublets. The intimacy of those snatched times, before everything went wrong. He was wrong, right from the start. She should have known. He was everything she shouldn’t have wanted. His priviledge, that upper class smile which gave a calculating look to his icy blue eyes. His Nordic features, despite the fact that he was Kent born. Home Counties. His alternation between intensity and gentleness, and then his gruff indifference, his sometimes violent demands and behaviour, and how he could talk his way out of him. How she had let him talk his way out of it, how she had agreed that all of their problems were her fault, she was insecure, because of her father.

But their nights and days in those hotel rooms were like pockets of secrets scattered over London. Holes in time that still seemed magical, despite what happened later. The pain in her stomach was cruel as she remembered kissing him, their mouths hot together, tongues binding, and then her eyes open and trusting as she gave him a blow job, and that sneer on his face, that little half smile. They’d laughed at the lipstick mark she’d left on his cock. She should have known.

She licked her lips, mouth still salty from the soup. The heat of the day had slackened and she’d enjoyed wandering through the tourist areas. You had to wander in these places, so intense was the mass of colour and culture. She walked past the entrance to the palace, shoulders cool, smelling the grit and stench from the horses. Past Downing Street, American accents reaching her ears, the flash of yellow jackets; police milling, past the impassive parliament buildings, the Thames glittering as night pooled together. It made her feel like she belonged to get impatient with tourists not watching the road or holding up a flustered cabbie just to stand back and get the best frame for Big Ben.

She ducked into the Westminster tube, navigated the stalls and warren of walkways. Her hip jutted on the escalator as she stood with one knee bent. London made her feel strong, because she had to be when she was here. She couldn’t let the memories seep in, because they were good and bad and too cruel because of it. She reached her platform as the tube glided in.

Standing in the centre facing the doors, she steadied herself against one of the poles. Her awareness was pricked as soon as she’d got herself in a position. She thought about the vampire books she’d read as a child, her irritation with passive female characters all in need of rescuing by beautiful, brilliant and tortured men, who were not exactly human. Had this been the case with Raleigh? Was she that different? In the end, he’d been such an addiction. But she thought about those vampires, and how they were always depicted as having a sixth sense, recognising their own kind. She felt like that now. Her own kind was on this tube. Familiar.

In the blur of her peripheral vision, she saw the shape of the man she’d seen earlier. Can’t be.

She turned her head a fraction, the shape became true; the same man from Euston. His mouth flickered with an easy, affable smile, a kind of shrugged apology, for what she wasn’t sure. She took in his clothes, casual and comfortable. Nothing like Raleigh, and yet he had the same blondeness healthiness about him, just that shade darker. That shade scruffier. In his hands, as he leaned casually against another central pole the next carriage alone – sign of a true commuter, someone who lived here – was a dog-eared hardback copy of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. Her only novel, carefully cupped in the wide hands of this man. She could see the cover jacket was shiny in places and realised that he, perhaps, or someone else, had taped it back together.

She almost smiled. Perhaps he saw the intention.

There was a real announcer over the intercom.

“Your next stop is Euston.” And further instructions, depending on where people were headed.

She did not dare turn her head towards the man and Sylvia Plath as she got off. She felt him watching her as he whizzed by. But she would never know if he really did. The disappearance of the tube left a much-needed breath of air, whipping her hair which had frizzed in the heat and airlessness down here. Navigating the corridors up and out of the ground, she climbed towards Euston, feeling as though she had left something important behind.

Two

“Don’t touch me.”

The rain sounded like a swarm of locusts, attacking the roof of the Mercedes, a plague on both of them. Being so close to him again was suffocating. Panic imploded inside Leah at intervals, the shockwaves rippling through her body.

I am calm, I am strong, I am in charge.

But she wasn’t any of those things.

The driver eased the car through the downpour, wipers flicking back and forth like an athlete casually flicking sweat. Her dress was stuck to her, see-through in parts. The smell of leather and aftershave made her nauseous.

“You have to believe, that I had no part in what happened to you.”

…….