Church’s heart broke into a thunderous rhythm and he felt drunk – relief, love, yearning, desperation, all churning together. It was Ruth, her long, dark hair a mass of curls and ringlets framing a pale face. She wore the shiny, unflattering overalls of a care home helper, the name of the home stitched in white above her left breast. Church was shocked by how inconsolably sad she appeared. That was not how he remembered her – in his head she was always smiling, filled with hope and passion.
He wanted to ease whatever pain she felt, but when he absently reached out, his hand passed through her. Rhiannon was right – he was a ghost. He wondered if he had done the right thing: to be so close to her yet still unable to connect was almost more painful than being separated by a gulf of more than two millennia.
Ruth,’ he whispered. The word caught in his throat. ‘I love you.’
8
For a fleeting moment, Ruth Gallagher had the strangest feeling that someone was watching her, but when she looked around, she was alone. The river was tranquil, yet it didn’t provide her with any peace. She felt the same deep sadness that had consumed her for what felt like her entire life. At times she felt as if she was observing what purported to be her life from somewhere unimaginably distant. She’d been to the GP so many times she was sure she was on some malingering list. The doctor always diagnosed depression and offered her an interesting variety of chemical bullets to shoot the black dog. She never took any of them. In her heart she knew he was wrong, as were her few acquaintances who claimed to have some insight into why she suffered. No one had any idea. They never would have any idea, and she would never know herself. It was one of the great, depressing mysteries of life.
Nor did she know why she was drawn so repeatedly to that spot near Albert Bridge. The pull was inexorable, and whenever she stood there she always felt as though some revelation was about to break through the cotton wool of her perception, but it never did. Occasionally she toyed with the idea that she might have a brain tumour, though she felt like a New Age Holden Caulfield. Or perhaps it was some other hideous disease that was sending out psychological tremors before the full quake hit. But she was haunted by the possibility that the answer was depressingly mundane: this was simply the way life was. Feeling dissatisfied, sad, out-of-sorts, unfulfilled was the norm, and the only way to deal with it was to find something to numb the pain.
She wrenched herself away from the sunset and set off across the bridge, still feeling as though someone was walking just a few feet behind. She called in at the first takeaway she found and ate a dismal burger without any enthusiasm before making her way to a bland pub in the maze of backstreets that ran away from the river.
She passed five birds sitting on a wall watching her with beady eyes, unafraid. Only one took flight, hovering over her for several yards before disappearing into the twilight. Five red cars crawled past, one after the other. The fifth pulled in and parked, but no one got out. On the next corner, five children hopped in and out of the gutter in play. One of them smiled at her, covering his left eye until she passed.
Ruth walked on, oblivious.
She sat in the pub for half an hour waiting for her friend to arrive, nursing a vodka and Coke. Though the men in the bar attempted to chat up any single woman who entered, they all left her alone. Ruth knew they could sense something off-putting about her beyond her beaten-down appearance.
Vicky finally put in an appearance at ten-past nine, forty-five minutes later than she had promised. She made no apology. Vicky was a co-worker at the care home, a hard-faced single mother. She had little in common with Ruth, but the two of them had no other friends of note, and sometimes their shifts aligned so they could spend a night together getting miserably drunk.
After an hour and a half and several vodkas, Ruth said, ‘Do you ever get a feeling you’re living a life that isn’t really yours?’
Vicky laughed bitterly. ‘All the time, darlin’. My real life is at the side of a pool in Florida. I’m just doing this for a joke.’
‘No, I mean it. I just don’t feel right.’ Ruth looked around at the other drinkers. ‘I wonder how many other people feel the same way. Putting up with what they’ve got instead of doing what they should be doing. Except they don’t know what they should be doing.’
Vicky snorted derisively. ‘You’re always going on like this. Can’t you just shut up and be happy with what you’ve got? Lots of people would kill for your job.’
Ruth drained her glass and stood up. I’m going to the toilet.’
‘No need to tell the world.’