It was months before the difficulty with Marnie and Addison was talked about, or even alluded to. The sight of their names in emails circulated around the department was enough to cause a pall to settle on everything, like ash from fires only just put out. Besides, the nature of the difficulty (that was the word we all used) was both so opaque and so distressing we’d have had trouble talking about it, even if we’d wanted to.
It fell to me to piece things together. My brief from Helen was simply to satisfy the university that nobody in the department was to blame. It fell to me because I am, she tells me, part of the furniture: unremarkable, functional, predictable. She forgets my tenure began not with quarterly budgets and voluntary redundancy schemes and so on, but in the School of Arts and Humanities, and with a thesis on the novels of Iris Murdoch. What I’m getting at is that in addition to gathering evidence from emails and text messages and conversations with colleagues, I’ve taken some liberties here and there – applied the mortar of imagination to the bricks of the facts at hand, if you like. There’ll be consequences – Helen enjoys her authority over me – but what do I care? I’m two months from retirement and besides, I’m feeling unwell. My throat aches, though not in that childish familiar way that announces the common cold. It’s something more – now what would be the word, I wonder? – more pressing.
*****
To the matter at hand. Dr Susan Addison and Dr Marnie Bils had been employed by the university in the Department of Physics since 2019 and 2008 respectively. Dr Addison claimed never to have been known by her first name, and was 32 at the time of the event. She was short and red-haired; she attracted students and colleagues as if by a strong gravitational field. Her clothes were tremendously feminine. I always thought this affected – her subject was a practical one concerning machine learning and climate-change modelling – but she enjoyed splashing about the McKenzie building in green dresses bought secondhand for the sake of the planet. She was always kind to me.
Dr Bils had begun her career in the Department of Literature, and was considered an interloper in the field of the sciences (‘All very interdisciplinary,’ said Helen, as if it were a slur). Her work involved a biography of the physicist Eddington, together with some sort of fooling about with Time’s Arrow. Once she tried explaining this to me, with reference to videos of bouncing balls demonstrating the direction of time, but I suspect she never really grasped her own subject. She was 50. Her hair had gone white early, and she kept it very short: it looked like a cap of swan’s feathers. She was very beautiful and took compliments as statements of fact.
The friendship between Addison and Marnie was to begin with a matter of geography. Addison would approach the campus from the east, and Marnie from the west; then they’d turn and go together for a quarter of a mile before arriving on university grounds. Marnie enjoyed her own benevolence in looking after a newcomer, and Addison enjoyed provoking an older scholar who’d got perhaps a bit complacent; Addison’s volubility was tempered by Marnie’s serene abstractions, and Marnie’s fondness for dreamy theorising was challenged by Addison’s practicality. They were unique among academics in having no competitive spirit between them. Women, I find, will compete in such skilled bouts that the bruises only come up when it’s too late to prove which of us landed the blow – but though Addison had a reputation for brutality, and Marnie’s vague grace concealed a capacity for spite, we never heard one say a bad word about the other over the course of almost six years.
*****
Towards the end of the autumn term Marnie walked to the university in her usual way, thinking how pleased Addison would be to see frost in November and the climate doing as it should. It was rush hour. Students came out of coffee shops examining their phones; harassed fathers clotted the junctions with bikes outside the primary school. Halloween and Christmas were mixed uneasily in tangles of tinsel and synthetic spider web, and in the window of the Sue Ryder shop an infant Christ bawled in the lap of a skeleton that lacked a lower jaw. Marnie felt at the same time that it all had nothing to do with her (she was working on a paper due for submission to a journal by the end of the month) and that a kind of infectious good cheer was setting in – she walked on.
Past Sue Ryder, and to Marnie’s right as she walked, a condemned row of terraced houses thrown cheaply up in the 1960s was coming down, to be replaced with a block of student accommodation. The lower part of the terrace was concealed by hoardings on which an ideal of student life was illustrated in garish computer-generated images: the word FUTUR8 was repeated in purple at regular intervals, and exasperated Marnie whenever she saw it. ‘What does it mean?’ she’d say to Addison. ‘Is it a proper noun? Is it a verb – are we all to be futurated?’ The upper windows of the vacant houses were visible above the hoarding, and damp wept in dark blots on to the pale concrete render.
Addison had a reputation for brutality, and Marnie’s vague grace concealed a capacity for spite
Running for several metres between the condemned terrace and the pavement, there was a wall at waist height, built of spalled red brick. It had been damaged over the years by careless drivers, and was considerably older than the terraced houses. It seemed out of keeping with them: there was the sense it had been built to enclose some larger vanished property. Men were at work. They filtered in and out of a breach in the hoarding, eating from Greggs paper bags. Marnie looked incuriously at them, since her mind was on a paper she’d read that morning on the order of time; then her attention was caught by the sight of a pair of shoes resting on the damaged wall. They were small, high-heeled and made of scuffed black suede; the toes were capped with red patent leather bordered by a strip of peeling gold. They were set a little distance apart and rested at a peculiar angle on the brickwork; their vacant, creamy interiors were blotted and worn. They were not new: they put her in mind of flappers frantically dancing with their backs to the wreckage of the war. Evidently, thought Marnie, some student had stumbled home late from a Halloween party in fancy dress, and took them off because they hurt – then ‘Oh’, she heard, in a familiar bright and careless voice, ‘Hello, hello!’ – Addison, bundled in leopard-print polyester fur, was cutting toward her through the crowd.
‘Addy,’ said Marnie, embracing her friend and turning with her towards the campus. ‘I got your message – how wonderful: tell me everything!’ So Addison did tell her everything (she’d secured another research grant; she’d been invited to the Alaskan Centre for Climate Preparedness; she’d packed for her weekend in Budapest with a lover – this entailed flight obviously, not ideal for a climate scientist, but impossible to be good every day of the week for God’s sake!), and Marnie pressed the solid, warm arm threaded through her own. ‘Well done, darling,’ she’d said, ‘well done’ – and if it did occur to her to turn and look again at the shoes tilting on the wall, the thought was only fleeting.
*****
The following morning was a Saturday, and though Marnie liked to stay away from the office at weekends, she couldn’t fend off a deadline by murmuring that time after all was a flat disc, and careers these days depended on a publication record: nothing for it but to cloister herself in the McKenzie building, and finish her paper for the journal. A cold raw day, this one, no life or pleasure on the streets: the pavements empty, the harassed fathers gone to blot the country roads with their coloured Lycra, the students sleeping in – in fact the place seemed actively deserted, as if everyone else had been given an evacuation notice that nobody had bothered to pass on. In Sue Ryder a solitary man browsed poorly ordered paperbacks; he appraised her, shrugged, and looked away. Marnie picked up her pace – her books were waiting; the campus coffee was surprisingly good – but approaching the condemned terrace she began to look about with a jerky questing motion which would have surprised her, if she could have seen it – ‘Ah,’ she said, ‘there you are!’ Two points of colour came insolently out of the gloom: the glossy red toes of the abandoned shoes, which were smaller than she’d remembered, their creamy interiors gaping and wet, their heels sharp and scuffed. Marnie stopped. She was aware she’d spoken aloud, but what did it matter – the workmen were gone, there was nobody to overhear. She surveyed the shoes. Now they tilted forward even further, as if someone had messed about with them overnight: they rested at an angle that ought not to be possible, the heels elevated above toes that pointed to the pavements. It occurred to her that if she reached out, she’d actually be able to pass her hand clean under those heels – that in fact they weren’t resting on the wall but suspended as if from string, and that this accounted for the disconsolate droop of the toes. She laughed then – she shook her head: what, did she think she’d encountered objects resistant to gravity, abandoned on a building site and on a wet weekend? She’d text Addison, who’d find it funny – then there was this spiteful thought: ‘Not that I can get a word in, what with all her good news, not that she ever asks!’ Marnie gasped at this, as if she weren’t responsible for it. She was coming down with something, that’s all it was: her throat ached, it felt as if a rash had developed behind her ears. She had arrived at the McKenzie building. It was almost empty; she let herself in.
*****
The women met again the following Wednesday afternoon. They texted often in the intervening days: Addison had spent too much time in bed to really have seen Budapest and had developed a UTI; Marnie’s paper was almost finished, but she thought she was getting a cold or even Covid, though it went no further than an aching throat and something to do with the skin on her neck. ‘Coffee in the McKenzie?’ Addison had said. ‘About three?’ – so Marnie took two paracetamol, put on her winter coat, and set out. It was a bright day. The skeleton was gone from Sue Ryder: now Christ slipped perpetually from the bloated knee of an inflatable Santa Claus. The FUTUR8 hoardings were offensively cheerful against the weeping concrete of the condemned terrace. Marnie as she walked became aware of a diffuse, resentful feeling, as if she were on the verge of remembering a grudge. She cast about for the cause, and could find nothing – it had arrived like weather, and only strengthened as she approached the hoardings. Then she remembered the abandoned shoes, and felt oddly that she’d like to see them again, though surely by now they’d have been taken from the wall by the woman who wore them. But there they still were, the patent leather toes distantly visible as two red points, like animals’ eyes in the headlights of approaching cars. At the sight of them, Marnie’s feeling of irritation sharpened into something like bitterness; then the phone in her hand lit up, and it was Addison to say she’d be late – more like 3.15, was that all right? Bitch, thought Marnie, careless bitch. She’d come to the wall and discovered she was averting her eyes, as if dismayed by the prospect of seeing the shoes. Instead she scrutinised the pavement as she walked slowly on: weeds grew where the tarmac met the crumbling brick of the damaged wall, tough and green despite the season.
After a few paces however there were no more weeds, and the wall seemed constructed of newer brick with edges sharp against fresh mortar. Marnie examined this with confounded interest. It was as if a section of the wall had been replaced overnight, and that here the pavement had been swept and weeded. The abandoned shoes – still set apart; still tipping upward at the gaping heel – rested there, and meanwhile, on either side, the bricks reverted to their spongy look, the mortar crumbling, the tarmac littered with spent heads of urban vegetation. Then as Marnie watched a fine trail of liquid began to trickle from between the shoes down the fresh red brick. This liquid appeared thin and faintly yellow, but ran with peculiar and excruciating slowness, as if it were thick as tar. Marnie was compelled to watch as the thin stream spread and soaked the brickwork, eventually reaching the pavement to flow in rivulets towards where she stood. Slowly it spread, appallingly slowly, giving out a familiar sour reek that roused her from her stupor. ‘No,’ she said, uncertain what it was she refused. With her head turned from the hoardings, the wall, the spreading pool, she hurried on; and as she went the bitter resentment that had arrived out of nothing receded, and left behind a kind of vacant, hopeless acquiescence.
‘You look awful,’ said Addison, who after all was not late. She rose from her table in the McKenzie café and noisily kissed Marnie’s cheek. ‘Well, as awful as you ever could’ – she admired the other woman’s pristine cap of hair, her narrow cashmere scarf – ‘Sit down, what can I get you?’ She fetched coffee, knowing, of course, how Marnie drank it; and clasping the paper cup Marnie sought out the bitter hopelessness that had come on her, as if probing with her tongue for a rotting tooth. There it still was, if only faint; it seemed actually to alter Addison as she looked at her – to make her red hair vulgar and false, her flounced skirt ridiculous, her headlong enthusiasm careless and stupid.
‘How’s the paper going?’ said Addison. She was eating cake. The crumbs were violently yellow and sticking to her fingers. ‘Got it in yet?’
‘Not yet,’ said Marnie, in her dreamy way. ‘Ends to tie up. In fact,’ she added, the thought having only just occurred to her, ‘I’m not sure about the premise.’
‘They’ll accept it,’ said Addison, licking her thumb. ‘They’ll take it, of course they will. It does matter, you know,’ she said, becoming encouraging, ‘what you do, how you think. It isn’t all just – theorising. If I hear anyone saying “Oh, Marnie Bils with her ideas about God and time” – I’ll punch their lights out. I actually would do that.’
‘Of course it matters. Of course it does’ – but now Marnie doubted it.
As Marnie watched a fine trail of liquid began to trickle from between the shoes down the fresh red brick
‘Besides, they’ll take anything these days. Two from me this term, did I tell you? Well’ – Addison had finished her cake – ‘it’s easier for me, I suppose. The warming world, the failure of the Paris Accord. Bad news travels fast, everyone wants to hear about the issue of our time.’ Here she made speech-mark gestures with sugary fingers, affecting irony. But it isn’t irony, thought Marnie, not really, she’s hiding in plain sight – she always wants me to know how well she’s doing, how loved, how wanted – and why does she wear so much mascara, silly cow, it looks ugly and clotted and unclean – ‘Two?’ she said, clutching the paper cup, spilling coffee. ‘You’re publishing two this term?’
‘God, hope I haven’t taken your space’ – Addison was mopping the table with napkins – ‘Wouldn’t that be awful, all the work you’ve put in –’
‘Yes,’ said Marnie, ‘yes, it would.’
‘Anyway,’ said Addison. ‘Anyway’ – she seemed to be receding from Marnie, as if from an unpleasant smell; she shivered, and put on her leopard-print coat. ‘Are you ill, darling?’ she said, faltering slightly at the endearment. ‘Are you getting a cold? Go home, rest up, it’s the Christmas party on Friday, you’ll want to be better for that.’
‘Will I?’ – Marnie put her coffee down and looked dumbly at the dregs. ‘I suppose so.’
‘Marnie.’ Addison spoke solemnly. ‘What’s the matter – have I done something? What have I done?’
Marnie felt then as if her brain had divided into a pair of sealed compartments, containing on the one hand her old fond devotion to her friend, and on the other an envious loathing so profound she must have been secretly storing it up over the years. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘nothing. It’s just that my neck aches, and I feel sick.’ These things were true, though it wasn’t sickness exactly: it had something more in common with dread. She stood, and in moving away from the table she stumbled, and discovered that this was because she was walking, without intending to, on tiptoes. Bitch, she was thinking, silly, careless, arrogant little bitch – she lowered her heels to the ground. ‘Bed, I think,’ said Marnie, speaking with a drunkard’s extreme care. ‘I’ll get myself to bed. No’ – she fended off Addison’s embrace, registering quite calmly her friend’s bewildered look – ‘Friday,’ she said, looking vaguely about the café, which seethed on the hour with students crossing from one seminar to another, ‘Friday, the party, see you then’ – with her back to Addison she raised her arm in dismissal, and left.
Now the bright day was brighter. Marnie headed towards the damaged wall with purpose. She was a woman of reason, and it struck her that there were two possible explanations for the bitter envy that had altered Addison into something unfamiliar and despicable. Either her state of mind was being affected by (of all things!) a pair of dancing shoes, or she was coming down with a virus that was causing a fever. The first proposition, being plainly absurd, was easily disproved: she’d expose herself to the shoes, not scuttle past them like a frightened child, and so regain her peace of mind and sleep her fever off. She reached the coloured hoardings. The exposed windows of the condemned terrace glared. Someone was at work out of sight: things were being dropped and retrieved. Marnie was afraid, and felt with savage clarity that Addison wouldn’t have been afraid – wouldn’t have turned a red hair at red patent leather toes on scuffed suede shoes, or liquid coursing down a mended wall – I hate her, she thought, and this usefully diminished her fear. Now the man behind the hoardings was taking a call and finding it difficult to make himself heard above the traffic: ‘You there?’ he bawled. ‘You there?’
Marnie had come to the place where the weeds abruptly stopped and the wall had the look of being newly built. Tentatively exploring her throat with her right hand, she lifted her eyes to the shoes, and saw they were no longer side by side; the left shoe was slipping from the wall. In fact (she moved nearer) it seemed actually now to be falling, if with an impossible slowness, over the edge of the upper course of bricks – the open heel of this falling shoe gaped wide, and trickles of yellowish fluid showed against the stained, pale leather. This same fluid had formed a pool on the pavement, the rim spreading with the same dreadful lassitude with which the shoe fell, and giving off a sour familiar smell which Marnie suddenly understood to be that of urine. The workman came out from the breach in the hoarding and swore benevolently at his phone, then stopped abruptly: ‘You all right there?’ he said. ‘Can I help?’
‘No,’ said Marnie, ‘Nobody can’ – bitch, she was thinking, with exhausting savagery, stupid careless bitch – the spreading pool of urine had almost reached her, and she pulled at the collar of her coat and hurried on. As the toppling shoes and the soaked wall receded, so too did her useless misdirected rage, leaving in its wake a hopeless vacancy that was, if anything, far harder to bear. (Later, when I found the man who’d been at work that day, he told me how he’d watched the white-haired woman go back and forth along the pavement all that afternoon, fixated on a section of the wall that seemed not to have anything remarkable about it; and that as she approached this place her lovely face would twist with spite, but that she always left it behind with an expression of resignation.)
*****
I really had no intention of going to the department’s Christmas party that Friday afternoon. But Helen insisted, and made it clear that she was speaking as my superior: ‘It would be good to see you there,’ she said, ‘if only for an hour or two. After all, it will be your last, won’t it?’
I was dutiful. I always am. I was first to arrive, and opened bottles of sparkling wine that nobody had bothered to chill. I saw Addison, I remember that. She’d braided her hair with tinsel, and was talking about some boots she’d found in the Sue Ryder shop that would be perfect for Alaska, really perfect. I remember the gold hoops she wore, and her bare arms with their finely worked tattoos. I remember the male student who touched her with a familiarity that would certainly have troubled Helen. I remember also how often, and how hopefully, she’d look over to the café entrance, or scan the room for the sight of Marnie’s pale head.
Plastic cups were emptied and filled; there were half-hearted attempts at dancing to relentless Christmas music
An hour passed. Plastic cups were emptied and filled; there were half-hearted attempts at dancing to relentless Christmas music. The trouble began as I prepared to leave. They sent for me, in the way they’d send for a janitor; but already I knew that something had happened – dull panic had come like a bow-wave towards me through the crowd. I heard, above the music’s tedious thud, a half-articulated keening that at first I’d mistaken for a song. Then someone shut the music off, and in the muddled quiet I made out the words: ‘Why? Why? I don’t understand!’ This came from the storeroom, where canteen-sized tubs of tea and coffee were kept; over there somebody was forcing the door, then being told not to force it. ‘Get out of my way,’ I said, ‘let me through – is somebody coming? Has somebody dialled 999?’ – though I had no idea then what help we needed. I recognised the man forcing the door as Addison’s over-familiar student, who seemed only a child to me then, lifting his arms in baffled defeat. ‘Let me through,’ I said; then seeing I was slight enough to slip through the narrow gap between the heavy door and its frame, I went in.
For a moment, I saw only stacked shelves revealed by the faint light falling through the gap; but my eyes adapted quickly to the dark, and I made out Addison lying in the corner against a sack of rice. She was panting as if she’d been running, and the tinsel was pulled from her hair. Her left arm was raised to cover her eyes; with her right hand she tugged at her dress, which was torn open, and showed a soft, pale stomach badly damaged by repeated blows. The weapon had not been sharp enough to break the skin, but had left many livid circular welts where blood pooled visibly in the flesh. ‘What did I do?’ said Addison, imploring me in a high childlike voice; then she turned towards the object that was slumped behind the door and preventing it from opening – ‘What did I do?’ No answer then; none ever. Dr Marnie Bils sat on the floor with her legs stiffly out. Her left foot was bare, and plasters were peeling from blisters on her heel; her right foot was crammed into an old-fashioned dancing shoe which was much too small, with red patent-leather toes bordered by a strip of peeling gold. Its companion lay beside Addison, gaping in disbelief. Marnie’s head was tilted back. She seemed to have died in the act of removing her scarf: her hands had scrabbled at it and were caught in the cashmere; her mouth and her eyes were open. As my eyes became accustomed to the dark, I thought I made out a dark hoop of bruising that ran uninterrupted across her throat from ear to ear (and much later, when the coroner recorded the cause of death as simply a cardiac event, I wondered if that bruise had faded by the time she reached the cutting table, or whether I’d only imagined it). ‘I don’t know what I did,’ said Addison, curling about her injured stomach like a kicked dog, ‘I don’t know what I did.’ Now somebody worked patiently on the door behind me to remove it from its hinges, and I was overcome with pity for Addison, and for Marnie, and in a curious way for myself – and it was perhaps because of this that I pulled the shoe from Marnie’s foot, and picked up its companion, and concealed them in my coat as the storeroom flooded with a watchful and a silent light.
*****
Marnie told me once that she didn’t believe in ghosts. Rather, she believed that time did not unfold simply as one thing after the other, and that consequently two points in time might briefly be experienced simultaneously. In Essex, she said, not far from Colchester, a ghostly legion was sometimes seen going down the hard shoulder of what had been a Roman road. The thing was, she said, these soldiers were only ever visible from the knee upward; but if you were to measure down to the point at which the soldiers’ legs would have ended at the soles of their feet, that place would meet exactly the level of the road they’d travelled at the time. So what had been taken for ghosts were in fact (she said) visible manifestations of a perpetually persisting past.
With this in mind I made enquiries about that damaged wall, which shows no evidence now of having ever been mended. I’ve studied town plans and maps and newspapers, and established without doubt that the condemned terrace had been built on the site of a small prison. In photographs this prison seems quite an attractive building: you might take it for a red-brick Victorian school, if you happened not to notice that all the windows were barred. It had taken only female prisoners, and between the years of 1874 and 1931 it had carried out 14 hangings. By then we’d become too civilised a nation to break a woman’s neck in public. A kind of raised platform at waist height had been constructed inside the prison boundary, and the gallows was erected there. Letters I have seen suggest the prison superintendent was never quite satisfied with the height or location of the platform, and every few years would order it to be raised, or lowered, and always kept from the view of the cells. Ten years after the last hanging was carried out, the prison was requisitioned for war use, and the gallows platform put to some other purpose. The last woman hanged was a dancer, and an ambitious one; over the course of some weeks she’d poisoned a younger rival out of bitter professional envy, and confessed readily enough to the crime, seeming to have lost all hope for a happy life – ‘I couldn’t care less,’ she’d said, ‘I really couldn’t care less!’
*****
It’s not for me to propose a solution. It is only for me to set out the facts. But I’ve no difficulty in imagining what Marnie herself might say, if she were here to say it: that the past is never dead, and that she’d encountered a piece of the past persisting, and persisting what’s more with dreadful slowness – time slowed by the gravity of the event.
There. I have made my report. I can’t do more. My throat aches, and I’ve no paracetamol left. Just now I saw Helen come towards the McKenzie building: she’ll be here soon, and I’ll deliver this by hand. I’d better leave now. She hates me to be late and I won’t be able to hurry. I’ve tried and tried, but I never could walk in heels.
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