Art Pact 176 - In Memory

We gathered at the side of the road, one by one drifting in from who-knows-where. We didn't see, didn't know that another one of us had arrived until there was suddenly one more of us standing there, looking down at the metal. We didn't speak, either. Other people passed around us, but to us they were just grey ghosts in the rain. None of them had been there, so none of them mattered. They might have stared at us, might have cursed us for a minute as they came upon our little gathering stuck solid in the flow of pedestrians like a plaque in a blood vessel, but to us they barely existed. We came in, one by one from who-knows-where until all eight of us were we-knew-where, and all eight of us looking down at the metal and thinking our own cold thoughts.

Seven was the last to arrive, as usual. Looking down at the metal I saw her shoes first, elegant black things with a high-heel filled in as is the style. Next to her Three: messy trainers. Next to him, Two in flat pumps. One wore running shoes, then there were walking boots in whose capacious interior my own toes wiggled uncomfortably, then Six's brogues, Four's scrubby deck-shoes, and finally Five in her Doc Martins. We stood in an uneasy arc, a horse-shoe with the open end to the south - down the map, so I thought, with all the luck running out and washing over the metal and away into the rain.

"There aren't words," Seven began. She liked to begin that way. With a contradiction. There were words, we knew, because she'd said them before. "We come here, year after year, to reflect on what could have been. To say our sorries, to cry our tears and then to dry our eyes."

Her knee jutted forward and with that motion her head descended into my line of sight. She knelt at her edge of the horseshoe, delicate linen trousers pressed against the damp pavement and then stretched taught over one slender leg. She reached out and touched the metal.

The gesture made it real, somehow. I found - with an electric shock - that my vision had been closing in like a tunnel, the metal moving away from me until it was something a hundred miles away viewed through a telescope, seemingly large but no actual threat to me. But Seven's touch awoke the metal, and I knew again that I was within reach myself, that I only had to step forward and bend down to press my fingers against the dent in the railing. How can it not have been repaired? It had been eight years. In eight years the surface of tarmac on the road outside my house had been replaced three times. In eight years Three had had, raised, and lost a child. In eight years the shopping mall in the centre of town had been built and gone from shiny and new to grubby and commonplace. Eight years can be (had been) a lifetime, and yet still the bent railing, the one metal shaft in this block that fence that separated pedestrian traffic from the cars whizzing past us, still it had not been repaired or replaced. The artifact of our guilt, the one thing about the whole affair that could have easily been fixed, and no-one had done anything about it.

"On that day," Seven continued, "we were witnesses and participants in a terrible tragedy. Dear Abby, laid low, sent into the final sleep, and we to continue, knowing that there would always be a hole in our lives, a fearful hole that would sit within us, devouring happiness if we allowed it to."

On the shiny patent-leather surface of Six's shoes drops of liquid appeared, and for a moment I expected to feel the drip-drop of rain on the back of my neck. It was tears, though. Six was crying silently. I wondered what he would say when it was all over, how he would explain the outburst of emotion. We were supposed to be here to cry, of course, but Six had always kept himself to tightly buttoned-up that I had never seen him get so much as watery-eyed before. Not even after - not even eight years ago.

"It is truly a thing to be mourned," said Seven, letting her soft voice grow a little louder so that I was sure passers-by must be able to hear her. "A life cut short, a secret shared, a fracture between the happiness of the past and the realities of the present. But as always we must not dwell so much on Abby's loss as upon our own response to it, how it has changed us all for the better in so many ways, how it has spurred us to become better, to become more successful people, to be greater than the..."

Where before I had felt as though I were seeing the railing from a great distance, a similar illusion took hold of my hearing. Seven's voice receded, becoming whispery and distant, and I realised that I was tuning her out somehow. I had realised something, something that came as a repulsive shock to me - that Seven was not here to feel guilty, but to gloat. Her eulogy was not designed to invoke a sadness about what we had done and the loss of who we had done it to, it was to sit on that grave and crow, to smarmily discuss all the things that Abby had lost and that Seven had taken from her. I felt my hands balling up into fists, the sharp ends of my fingernails digging painfully into my palms.

Was I the only one here for contrition? I wondered suddenly. Was Three here to cry about that night, to offer her apologies to Abby and beg her to protect the ghost of her child, wherever it might be? Or was she simply here to reassure herself that but for the whims of fate she might be below the ground herself? What about Six - were those tears for Abby, or for him? Did two come from her comfortable bank job in the spirit of contrition, or as an empty gesture?

I felt the hairs rising angrily on the back of my neck.