Slow River

It was almost dawn before she heard footsteps. She peered around the doorway. A woman, with dark blond hair tucked into the collar of a big coat, walking with a night step: easy, but wary. One hand in her pocket.

“Help me.”

Her voice was just a whisper and Lore thought the woman had not heard, but she slowed, then stopped. “Come out where I can see you.” The kind of voice Lore had never heard before: light and quick and probably dangerous.

“Help me.” It came out sounding like a command, and Lore heard for the first time the rounded plumminess of her own voice, and knew that she would have to learn to change it.

This time the woman heard, and turned toward the doorway. “Why, what’s wrong with you?” The hand shifted in its pocket, and Lore wondered if the woman had a weapon of some kind. “Stand up so I can see you.”

“I can’t.” Trying to imitate the slippery street vowels.

“Then I’ll just walk along home.” She sounded as though she meant it.

“No.” Lore tried again. “Please. I need your help.”

The woman in the long coat seemed suddenly to shrug off her caution.

“Let’s have a look at you, then.”

When she stepped closer to the doorway and saw Lore’s muddy hair and nakedness, she grinned. “You need to get rid of the boyfriend or girlfriend that did this to you.” But when the light fell on Lore’s bloody back, the woman’s tace tightened into old lines, and her eyes flashed yellow and wise in the sodium light. She fished something out of her coat pocket, slid it inside her shirt, and took off her coat. She held it out. “This might hurt your back, but it’ll keep you warm until I can get you home.”

Lore pulled herself up the metal and glass corner of the doorway, and stood. The woman caught her arm as she nearly fell.

“Hurt?”

“No.” It was numb now.

“It will.” That sounded as though it came from experience. “It’s too cold to stand around. Just put this on and walk.”

Lore took the coat. It was heavy, old wool. The lining was dark silk, still warm. “It smells of summer,” and there were tears in her eyes as she remembered the smells of sunshine on bruised grass, a long, long time before this nightmare began.

“Put it on.” The woman sounded impatient. She was glancing about: quick flicks of her head this way and that. Her hair, free of the coat collar now, swung from side to side.

Lore struggled with the coat. She flinched when the warm silk touched her back, but all she felt was a kind of stretched numbness like the opening of a vast tunnel. “My name…” Shock made her dizzy and vague. “Who…”

“Spanner.” Spanner was scanning the street again. It was noticeably lighter. Another taxi skimmed by. “Fasten the damn thing up. And hurry.”

On that first night it seemed to Lore to be miles and miles from the city center to Spanner’s flat. She learned later that it was barely a mile and a half. It was not that she had a hard time moving—on the contrary, she seemed to skim along the pavement without effort—it was more that the journey stretched endlessly and the false dawn blended with the sodium streetlamps to form a light like wet orange sherbet that always seemed just a moment away from fizzing, boiling off, leaving no oxygen. Lore knew she was ill. She remembered the blood, hers and his, the sharp plastic tick as it dripped onto the plasthene.

She had a vague impression of a shop window and railings, and then stone steps. The stairwell was made of unfinished brick. The mortar looked old. Spanner must have opened the door then, because she found herself inside.

Spanner did not turn on any lights; it was bright enough with the streetlights washing in through unshuttered windows. Lore swayed in the middle of an enormous L-shaped room. Several power points glowed at one end, like red eyes.

“You need to sleep,” Spanner said, “not talk. Here’s some water. Some painkillers.” Her voice sounded different in her own room, and she seemed to appear and disappear, reappearing with things—a glass, some pills; showing Lore the bathroom. It was like watching a jerky, badly edited film. “Here’s the mat.” A judo mat, by the west wall, under the windows opposite the curtained opening to the short limb of the L, the bedroom. “I’ll turn up the heat. You won’t be able to bear anything on that back for a while. I don’t think we can do much about it tonight. Looks like it’s scabbing over. I’ll get a medic for you in the morning, and we’ll talk then.”

Lore knew she must be saying things, responding in some way she assumed reassured Spanner, but she was not aware of it. Spanner touched a pad of buttons on the wall. “I’ve set the alarm. If you need anything, or want to leave, wake me.”

Then Spanner went into the bedroom and closed the curtain behind her.