She meets with a small group of friends, drinks coffee, drinks wine. She thinks about ways to fill her time. She walks almost daily in the fields and woods near her home. And she writes portraits of dead people she has never met.
*
Nine years before, when Ryan was convicted and jailed for causing Caitlin’s death, Anna searched newspapers for a report of the crime and the court case, for signs that the world reflected her fury or had at least marked her loss. She found one short paragraph in the local paper. An explanation: he was of good character, he had snapped, he had caused death by accident; being jilted had provoked him, made him lash out. Provoked. As though it were Caitlin who was responsible, as though she had pushed violent death upon herself. Anna read this and vomited, her skin prickling with heat and cold. This disingenuous framing and the indifference of its bland retelling acted as an accelerant to her wild grief. Caitlin was mentioned only as a component in Ryan’s story. No more than that.
In the ruined months after the court case, when nothing worked, Anna pored over newspapers and watched news programmes. Could it really mean so little that people died? Could it really be of such little interest? She picked over the news, online and in print, archive and day-to-day, scouring the local and national papers for references to women killed as Caitlin had been, by men who had once claimed to love them. She discovered quickly that there were many of them – the statistics were readily available. But the women were, like Caitlin, as good as invisible. Women murdered in English towns, by exes and husbands, deaths too commonplace to rouse even curiosity. Mothers, sisters, daughters. Complex, beloved lives that, if they appeared at all, were marked only as an administrative round-up of local court activity. Anna’s black focus drove those around her to despair. Let it go, Anna, let it go. We know she mattered; we care.
Such cajoling tenderness, such love and frustration, such gentle holding down eventually told and Anna became compliant. She turned away from the terrible absences, the reminders of her girl. She quieted herself, externally. The turmoil inside soon could not be seen or heard. But in her quest, she had noticed others. Strangers in distant lands who died in terror attacks and checkpoint shootings. They were not even given a name. Multiple deaths from drone strikes, terrorist bombs, war, passed over as a tally of the activities of one side or the other. Death, it seemed, was only of interest if it excited the morbid thrill of the unusual, the lavish fetishising of television crime dramas. Domestic violence was certainly too drab a crime. Distant strangers were too insignificant to warrant the care of mourning as well as counting.
As grief slowed and stilled her, pulling her away from reminders of her daughter, she kept quiet attention on these other dead. It was a salve, of sorts. The news, this most ungentle showing of the world as an arena, a place of skirmishing and destroying, provided a strategy that allowed her, with unnoticed subterfuge, to tame her own grief; whilst reading, her anger came out, but as a response to news. The outrage she felt acted both as a reassurance that she remained alive to things outside of herself and as a substitute reason for her fury.
At first she noticed only that these people were not being noticed. Fifteen people, thirty-seven people, two people. She drew her private attention to their insignificance, to the careless passing over of their lives. She damned up her own anger and poured it by the ladle on their behalf. She felt a true connection, kinship, with their unknown families. Nineteen people were killed today. There has been a bus bombing; reportedly there are twenty-three dead. After a number of slowly becalming years, she went further than simply noticing them. She began to imagine what the people were like, eventually writing portraits for each. Inventing them gave weight to her care.
She calls them her invented ghosts. They have, in stealth, become a chorus, a quiet crowd, subtle sentinels of her grief and guardians of her homeless love. Over the last six years her collection of portraits has grown. Nine notebooks and journals are now filled with them. The latest one, an old green exercise book found in the attic, is nearly full.
It began on a morning much like this one, a cold and sunless day six years before and a little deeper into the winter. Christmas, itself a burden, had been passed with relative ease, though the relief of that was tarnished by the anticipation of the greater test to come. The most appalling of anniversaries was looming, a few small squares in the calendar away. Four years since Caitlin’s death, aged just nineteen.
On this day, not long before the anniversary, she had not answered the phone or gone out. After cleaning already clean cupboards and shining already clear windows, she sat to read the paper. In her habitual, well-rehearsed way, she acknowledged the dead. There had been a bomb in a distant marketplace, one of several that day. A filament snagged and slowed the story down, her habitual soft focus pulled into unexpected sharpness. Somehow that detail caught her; a marketplace, perhaps the most domestic public space there is. People shopping for food, plastic buckets, scarves, aluminium pans. A place providing easy acquisition of the humbler tools of life: domestic wares, phone parts and gaudy cases, vinyl handbags, eggs, cabbages. Mothers buying an evening meal, teenagers shopping for the excitingly new and obligingly affordable. A man buying a bucket so he could clean his house. These ordinary people doing ordinary things, they would be the dead.
She thought of there being no dinner in some households, because the shopping never came back from the market. A husband whose anxiety makes him fear, as if seeming finally by prophecy rather than grinding habit, that his wife has been killed. A family who wouldn’t know for long hours where their father had gone. Somewhere in a town where death might just as easily come at the hands of a checkpoint soldier, a sniper, a drone. Somewhere in a world where escape from such horror resulted in thousands of drowned bodies day by day, as boats and brutal businessmen cast people to their fate in the deceptive, seductive glint of a blue sea that pretended to show the way to safety.
Over the next days, the people behind the numbers began to materialise when she picked over stories in the news. As she was standing at a supermarket checkout she was hit by a surge of connection to the others in the queue. They were ugly and beautiful, unkempt, elegant, all mixed. Their banal ordinariness for once caught her attention, linked them to those killed by bombs in markets in Iraq or by roadsides in Afghanistan. The young man with a backpack and scraggly beard, buying four hooped-together cans of lager and some broccoli and biscuits, trousers carelessly rolled above bare brown ankles. The woman with tired eyes and pink plastic earrings, grey showing at the roots of her black hair. The old man with beige slacks and an olive cap, a small brown shopping bag ready for his bread rolls and two bananas, a small shakiness in his hands. Anna felt a tender kind of love and sadness for them, those ordinary people caught there in a tiny moment of complex lives, as those killed were caught in what became the last moment of their lives, when a crude bomb exploded near enough to kill them. Any one of them, all of them, could be one of the bodies, a life behind the numbers. She made her way through the queue and looked intently at the young cashier, haunted by a sudden picture of her, dead amidst the rubble of a faraway town, her mouth open, small teeth exposed to the heat and dust of disaster. She felt the upwell of a sob, an echo that pulsed in her chest, an inappropriate urge to shield the unknown girl from a fate that was not hers, from any fate that meant her harm.
Later, when she was walking through the woods, she thought about the nameless people killed that morning in a suicide bombing in Baghdad. What did she know about that distant place? Who were the people hidden in that neutral measuring? Her curiosity pulled them to her; she started to fill them out, describing them to herself.
She imagined first a woman in her early forties; she saw a living body, warm, plump, sensuous. She saw black hair, falling in curves like layers of raven wings. She saw her clothed in stretchy turquoise trousers, a pale-yellow top. She saw the woman asleep in bed at night, lying curled on her side, holding her husband’s muscular brown forearm. Other pictures followed, describing the woman’s busy life. She imagined her