Entanglement. Katy Mahood
his face to one side and vomited.
They laid him on a stretch of pavement, a rolled-up coat beneath his head, and a crowd of people gathered around. Between their legs he caught glimpses of the High Road: a police cordon, blue lights flashing, the delicate twinkle of shattered glass, the dimly horrified faces of onlookers. A tall man and a girl in a red dress.
The noise came from far up the high street, a deep thud that threw sound waves so powerful that they shifted a tide of air with them. Stella and John kept walking. Soon, there were sirens and pulsing blue lights, a glitter of broken glass flung out across the road and the burnt-out sockets of windows gaping. A small crowd had gathered, wordless, by the police tape and they stood to the side of a ruddy-faced man, grey hair greased back, who half-turned and gave the slightest nod before his eyes returned to the smoking carcass of the pub. Stella looked from the chaos to the faces of the people watching. On the other side of the cordon, a woman in dust-caked clothes was holding a lighter to a cigarette with shaking hands and Stella felt a sudden need to help. She stooped to duck beneath the tape but a heavy hand held her away.
‘Get back!’
The voice grew louder, ‘You all need to get back, go home and get indoors. Now!’
In a tangle of indignation and fear, Stella scowled at the policeman who looked hard back.
‘Leave now, miss – it’s not safe.’
She drew herself up and bit the inside of her cheek to stop the tears that threatened to spill, speaking to John with her sharpest English accent. ‘John, we should go.’
He looked back at her, his face empty. For a second it was as though he didn’t know who she was.
Stella caught him by the wrist, her indignation dissolved. ‘John?’
He rubbed his eyes, swaying slightly. ‘Sorry, Stel, bit woozy. Yes, yes – let’s get back.’
Beyond the police tape, two firemen emerged from the black of the pub, a young man draped between them with blood on his face and vomit on his shirt, one leg dragging behind him. A few metres from the building they lowered him to the ground and put a rolled-up coat under his head. Stella’s red dress billowed in a gust of wind and she bent to smooth it. As she looked up, she met the gaze of the injured man. His dark hair was matted and his left eye was swollen, but his stare was so intense that for one uncanny moment she could have sworn he seemed to know her.
12 October–18 November 1977
Different models may give equivalent – or ‘dual’ – pictures of the same phenomenon. It is, in essence, an acknowledgment that each model is incomplete – just one vantage point of many – and that we must rely on multiple, seemingly contradictory models in order to construct the truest picture of reality.
McKearnan, L. Quantum Entanglement.
Paradox Publishing, 1982 (p. 25)
12 October 1977
Falling in and out of consciousness, Charlie’s body became his whole world: the sharp stabs of horror, the dull drone of shock. When he woke, his mother was at the foot of the bed, smelling of alcohol and a cloying perfume. He opened his mouth to speak and saliva stretched between his cracked lips like gum.
‘Where’s Annie?’
His mother sobbed and leaned over him. Up close, her face was covered in a fine layer of grease and caked with powder. Lipstick had bled into the creases around her mouth and her eyes were red and clogged with clumps of mascara. She touched his cheek and stared, her eyes empty.
‘It’s your fault she was there.’
Charlie felt a rush of horror, saw the white hand in the darkened bar as a wave of nausea passed over him. He strained to pull himself up, looking for Annie. And then he remembered. He turned away and pressed his face into the clean chemical smell of his hospital pillow. Even as his mother’s voice grew shrill, Charlie did not look up. Eventually a fierce-looking nurse took his mother’s arm and led her away, telling her to come back tomorrow when she’d had some rest.
Several days later, he stood in the basement of the hospital, a small bag of possessions at his feet. His legs felt weak as his mother leaned against him, pungent with brandy even at this early hour of the morning. A squat, red-nosed policewoman walked briskly up and introduced herself. Charlie noticed that her lisp sent an erratic arc of spittle as she spoke.
‘Straight on, sir, madam. Second on the right.’
They walked along the corridor beneath the Artex tiles and fluorescent tubes. A pair of aproned nurses clipped past them, busy with their shift, their patients. Their lives won’t change a bit because a girl they’ve never met is dead, Charlie thought, today is just another day for them. They were greeted by a woman who introduced herself as a family liaison officer. She laid her hand on Charlie’s elbow as she opened the door.
‘She’s through here.’
Annie’s coffin lay in the centre of the small grey room, a vase of white flowers on a stand beside it. His mother gripped his hand and Charlie felt a surge of cold fear. It seemed as if the room was vanishing, its walls fading into darkness, leaving only that box in the centre and whatever was left of his sister. Sweat prickled across his face and his bowels felt suddenly weak.
Retaliation, that’s what the police had called it. The word rang brassy in his head as Charlie stood above Annie’s flawless cheeks and pale hair, aware of an incongruous urge to defecate. He gripped the side of the coffin as he tried to piece together the story of how they had ended up here; how he’d come to lose the only person whom he’d loved without question or conditions and whose love for him he’d never doubted. Beside him, his mother’s knees gave way and he held her, noticing how small she was: just bones and cloth and the sweet smell of alcohol. He led her to a plastic chair and sat with his arm around her as she shuddered hopeless sobs into his chest.
The twisted shell of the pub had been splashed across the papers, which he’d studied with a grim resolve. Now it reeled across his mind, an endless flow of thoughts he could not quiet, an unstoppable spool of images. He stroked his mother’s hair and felt her soften into him, infant-like, as he hummed the half-remembered lullabies she’d sung him as a child. Years later, when he knew much more of daughters and of loss, he would be glad that he had offered her that small moment of kindness.
When he got home, he hung his suit on the back of the bedroom door. In the living room, he picked up the phone and dialled the long string of digits beginning 0033. Beth’s voice, when she answered, was bright.
‘Charlie! How are you?’
He realised he didn’t even know where to begin.
She arrived at his flat the next evening with a bag of dirty clothes and a bottle of Talisker. Charlie pulled her to him, overtaken by a need so urgent that he lifted her skirt and pushed her knickers to one side while they were still in the hallway.
Afterwards, as they lay on the sofa drinking whisky, Beth took his hand and traced a pattern on his palm, remembering her parents’ disapproval the first time she had brought him home. ‘No family, no roots,’ her mother had said. ‘How will he even know how to take care of you?’ But Beth had known that her mother was wrong. A passion that burned as bright as this would take care of itself.
As a child, she’d always