Cynthia leaped back from the curb, drenched in dirt-stink water.   It was only 8am, but for the third time today, the bus had driven right past her as she waited at her regular stop, her arm outstretched.  She looked down at her new skirt.  The pale green silk was peppered with oily blotches.  She’d be late for work.

“Fucking hell,” she muttered again, fighting back the tears, and set off walking along the main road in the direction of the office.

Later that evening, she pours herself a glass of Chardonnay and wraps her favourite blanket around her shoulders.  Her day hadn’t got any better.  At work, she’d been unable to get her voice heard at the meeting; had shrunk back in her chair and watched the clock instead.  She had good ideas but her voice stuck in her throat when she tried to express them.  Frustrated at herself, she’d slipped off her heels and surreptitiously, expertly, worried at the blister on her heel until her supervisor called time and Cynthia shuffled her papers together and hurried out of the conference room.  She’d spent the afternoon with the phone held a foot from her ear, unable to get a word in edgeways with an angry client.

She adds a couple of drops of peppermint oil to a bowl of steaming water and plunges her feet into it.  She should have drawn the curtains.  From her seat, she can see past her own balcony into her neighbours’ living room, a bricked box of equal dimensions.   The element of closeness and separateness in equal measures was the clinching factor in her choice of apartment.  She had reasoned that she could be alone and yet surrounded by people.  Now, though, looking into her neighbours’ lives – at the candles blinking placidly, the half-drunk bottle of red wine, the couple sharing a joke across the dinner table – Cynthia wishes she’d taken the poky studio overlooking the car park.

For the first few months, she thought that single life suited her.  She bought herself flowers from the market each Sunday, and admired the arrangement of sweet peas on her bedside table for the rest of the week.  She ate white chocolate in bed, at all hours.  She adapted her sleeping position to fill a double bed and spent her bonus on a piano, on which she practised the same tune over and over.  She strung pink lights the length of the hallway and bought a matching tea set for display purposes only.  For a brief spell, she ate only soup.

As autumn succumbed to winter, she ventured out less often.  Friends stopped calling, and Cynthia was glad for the rhythm of work, though her body became used to the stillness of a weekend in bed and she was forced to buy an old-fashioned alarm clock that jolted her awake  on a Monday morning, confused and a little afraid.  The shower temperature was never right – her skin was often red and itchy, as though her body longed to shed it.  She built a cocoon of soft surfaces and neutrality and ate bran flakes for breakfast, dinner and tea.  Sometimes she forgot to wear perfume.

The couple opposite moved out suddenly and Cynthia watched a family of four haul their possessions into the flat.  She wondered how they manoeuvred around each other in such a small space, and whether they were happy to do so.  The children were sullen.  When she waved, they didn’t wave back.

In October, the hours of daylight dwindled to a meagre strip of weak yellow light on her parquet floors, and Cynthia stopped bothering to open the curtains.

December cast her neighbourhood in snow, and Cynthia’s skin paled.  On her two weeks holiday from work, she consumed only what she could buy on the internet and listened intently for her buzzer as the delivery men came and went.   She unplugged her phone except for an hour each evening between 6 and 7 when she listened to her messages and held automated, bland phone calls with the few friends who still bothered.

She dreaded the first day back. Stepping onto the bus, she was unprepared for the cacophony of voices that seeped towards her like pooling blood.  On the street, pedestrians walked straight into her and refused to make eye contact.  Colleagues at work ping-ponged conversation over her head, and it was four days before the office chatterbox did a second-take and asked Cynthia, warily, if she’d had a good holiday.  Cynthia was no longer copied in on email correspondence.  Often, although the corridors in her building were wide enough for two mail carts to pass with a foot between them, she found herself veering to one side to let someone past.

February brought tack and gossip.  Even when she was in a relationship, Cynthia had loathed Valentine’s Day.  She needed the supermarket only to buy milk, and she walked across the car park determined not to be distracted by the crass displays of hearts and teddy bears.  The soles of her flat ballet pumps were silent on the tarmac as she walked head down and hunched towards the automatic doors.

The first time it, she assumed the doors were faulty.  She tutted, took a step back and forward again and waited for them to open.  Still nothing.  She looked up for the motion sensors above the panes of glass, and waved a hand frantically in front of them.  The doors refused to budge.

Cynthia cupped her hands and peered into the store.  Through another set of doors, she could see the blurred outlines of shoppers pushing trolleys, men in suits struggling with too-big bouquets.  Of course the store was open.  It was open 24 hours a day.

She stepped back again and ran towards the doors, jarring her shoulder against the toughened glass when they still refused to part.

‘Screw this,’ she said, laughing aloud.

When she was halfway across the car-park, Cynthia noticed a woman her own age, striding purposefully towards the store.  Cynthia instinctively slowed and glanced backwards.  The automatic doors opened immediately and the woman continued on her way, her stilettos applauding her entrance into the gloss and sheen of the supermarket.  Cynthia cursed her luck and retraced her steps.  But again, she stood at the doors unable to gain entry.

She repeated her experiment for ten minutes, standing blankly in front of the glass panels, retreating, watching others enter without trouble.

After a while, she remembered what it was that made her persevere, and what it was about the situation that troubled her so profoundly.   She had once stood in line at the turnstile of a Paris metro station, and winced as a stray dog, forgotten, wandered and became trapped between the metal poles designed for humans.  Cynthia had watched as the metal crushed its fur, then its bones.  The dog’s howls had reverberated around the tiled tunnels and followed Cynthia all the way back underground.  She flung herself onto the next train, her heart pounding and her head spinning.

She picked her victim carefully.  The man was obese. She was careful to walk Siamese and parasitic in step with him.  He didn’t seem to notice.

Safe inside the supermarket, she dug deep in her bag for the credit card she’d taken out on a whim.  She spent a week’s wages in the cosmetics aisle, the same again on clothes.  She bought food she’d never usually dream of eating, and arrived at the check-out with a trolley piled high with extravagance.  She forgot to buy the milk she’d come in for.

Over the next week, Cynthia skated on the surface of daily life, in a constant state of enforced sensory bombardment.  She flaunted her purchases with an unswerving single-mindedness.  She wore a bright yellow coat, with a sculpted skirt that twirled as she walked.  At the bus stop, she smiled at her own reflection in her patent leather shoes.  She applied perfume regularly throughout the day and invested in a pair of sonic-boom headphones designed by NASA.  Unwittingly, she developed a habit of talking to herself.  She began to cook in triple quantities, with nothing left uneaten.

In the middle of the night, she wakes feeling bloated, as though her skin isn’t big enough to contain her.  In the living room, she reaches for the bottle of whisky that she started earlier, and takes a long drink from the bottle.  She unlatches the balcony door and contemplates going outside.

She hasn’t been onto the balcony in months.  When she first moved in and it was still a novelty, she had gone out there first thing every morning.  It sharpened her mind to observe her surroundings and place herself in them.  She was surprised by the offerings that the universe brought to her.  First was the fly: hexagonal amber eyes and a black and red body.  It rested on her wrist and waited, watching her.  In summer, a dandelion feathered slowly towards her open palm, but she didn’t take the opportunity to make a wish.  In autumn, she had noticed a swarm of wasps on the wall below, and had run inside and clasped the door shut firmly behind her.

Now, she steps tentatively, barefoot, onto the concrete.  She had dressed up for herself tonight, stockings clipped to her thigh beneath a tight nightdress.  The air stings at her shoulders.  She places her drink on the balcony ledge and looks up.

In the room opposite, a child stands silently at the foot of his parents’ bed.  His eyes are wide.  He looks at Cynthia and frowns.  She raises her drink towards him and his face change abruptly, his focus seeming to withdraw to the near distance, as though seeing a reflection in one of the surrounding windows.  Slowly, he raises his hands to his ears.

Cynthia hears the noise, too.  She sees the blaze of light creep along the parquet floor, as the universe brings its final offering and answers her secret prayers for obliteration.

In the room opposite, the boy screws his eyes tightly closed.

The newspapers called it a freak accident.  Cynthia was the only fatality.  The surrounding windows were untouched.  The hole in her apartment wall was missile-precise.

The tangle of skin in the corner of the room was barely recognisable as human, aside from the cherry-red lips that smiled from a smashed skull.

They called it The Amphitheatre, although it was more of a half-hearted mound curving gently up to a field of cows.  The only battles that took place there were personal and imperceptible.

Nick leaps down from the dry-stone wall and surveys the night.  The Amphitheatre has no equal in the town.  He visits every time he is home, drawn to a vastness and sense of perspective absent from the rest of his life.  It is the place where everything began and the place where he foresaw the end.

‘Supposing we don’t break our bones,’ Nick’s younger brother, Ben, had retorted almost instantly.  ‘Then what?’  His voice, purred through gappy teeth, expected an answer.  As usual, Nick had the feeling he was being watched and, not knowing what to say, he turned away and studied his footsteps in the snow.  When he looked back, his brother had gone, co-opted into the winter masses, and Nick was thankful to be left alone on the hill, clutching his unused sledge like a shield.

It was easy to stay lost that day.  There were a million kids in fluorescent jackets like his, making the most of the fast-melting snow.  Nick dug a trench on a plateau half-way down the hill and hid.  He saw his brother only once more that afternoon.  As Ben flew overhead on an an improvised toboggan run, Nick glimpsed a fleeting and uncharacteristic sheen of terror in his hazel eyes.  He dug further into the trench and took his Walkman from his pocket.

Now, ten years later, Nick finally thinks of a way to protect his brother, and he screams his answer into the winter night.  His voice careens down the hill.  At the ridge, the words tremor, as though aware that they cannot change anything.  At the bottom, where Ben had risen from the sledge triumphant, Nick’s voice ricochets around the basin of The Amphitheatre, and Nick covers his ears, certain that he is standing in the barrel of a gun.

Ben promised he’d never pull the trigger.  The imitation Colt was pointed at Nick’s head and the pavement outside their house was littered with used-up red plastic caps.

Nick jogs down the hill.  His legs are numb from a night in the cold, and he fights the sensation of falling with every step.  Earlier, he watched the sun blaze off the jagged red sandstone of the abbey in the distance.  Now, the abbey is silhouetted against a petrol blue sky and the streetlamps have turned from pink to orange.  He follows the road straight ahead.  He’s not interested in short-cuts tonight.  Not the track along the side of the beck, where he confessed to a disinterested school friend one summer.  Nor the woods winding above, where Ben hid one winter.

From behind, they looked identical, Nick’s permanently furrowed brow hidden, and Ben’s permanent grin. At times they were mistaken for twins.  They whirled around each other’s worlds like snow in a snow dome.   When Ben appeared in his bedroom doorway, looked Nick in the eye and said, ‘I am destined for greatness,’ Nick floated on down the corridor and pretended not to have heard.

After ten minutes of walking, the open farmland begins to narrow into the outskirts of the town.  Silent, residential streets branch away from the main road.  Overhead, the oak trees, already strung with Christmas lights, arch towards each other in a leafy kiss.  Nick feels in his pocket for the nub of a headphone.  When he presses play, nothing happens, the task of recharging batteries forgotten between hospital visits and his parents’ accusations.  Nick pushes the headphones into his ears nonetheless, a habit adopted from years spent on public transport.  He keeps his earphones on and his head down: he has the kind of face that people want to punch.

Anger and Nicky are old, tired friends.  The seething, that begins in the bone marrow, dense as a coin, and coils its way through the blood to redden his cheeks and tense his fists.  The single block of light at the petrol station window reminds him of all the trips they never got to take.  The times he promised Ben he’d teach him to drive, and the months that Ben’s medication wouldn’t allow it.  He crosses the garage forecourt and glances in at the girl in the window.  She seems not to notice him and continues to coil a blonde strand of hair around a chewed, yellow pencil.

Television aerials replace trees, and the space between houses shortens from detached to semi-.  The road down to the town centre is long and sloping, tumbling you eagerly down into a Saturday night and forcing an uphill, drunken return home in the early hours of Sunday.  Nick tries to recall the bass line of his brother’s favourite song, that blared from a jukebox every weekend and accompanied the smell of aftershave and the clink of bottles.  Instead, he can think only of the jangle of Prince’s guitar, and the way Ben’s body quivered in the bed beside him, despite the strongest grip Nick could muster.  Nick feels the dread setting in at the thought of returning alone, his mind like a sand-timer, always chasing his brother into empty air.

For the first time all evening, Nick notices the presence of other people in the town.  Four women conga their way into a taxi up ahead.  A hundred metres down the road, a man struggles to keep his footing on the ice outside a red-bricked terrace. Nick reaches out instinctively and quickens his step but by the time he reaches the ice, a front door has slammed.  The man’s face appears fleetingly at a window and then the curtains are drawn.

The blinds in Nick’s new flat are identical to those of the last clinic that Ben was in.  The clank of cheap plastic at the hospital window, drawing attention to the pronounced gap between the spoken words, as he poured his brother another glass of mineral water.  Finally, Ben broke the silence, drowsily pointing out that the label on the bottle was “naivE” spelt backwards.

Over the years, Nick has tried to identify the point at which their lives diverged.  He had always thought of life not as a figure 8, but as a more jagged, restrictive version of that shape: two equilateral triangles joined at a point.  The same went for his relationship with Ben.  Nick stuck to his side of the point, but Ben both inhabited the centre and walked the extremes, constantly tipping the balance.  In response, Nick found himself physically shrinking, trying to occupy less space, hunching his shoulders and never causing a scene, in an attempt to attain equilibrium.

The day their lives diverged may have been the day Ben first asked Nick to pack his survival bag.  Nick thought it was a joke at first.  It was after midnight, and his little brother was wearing his pyjamas with the dinosaurs on.  Ben had opened up the sleeping bag to check it for bugs, and he couldn’t figure out how to compress it back in.  When Nick reached for the light-switch, his brother grabbed his hand and gave him a Chinese burn and a steely stare.  In the dark, Nick obediently rolled the sleeping bag into his brother’s rucksack and reluctantly promised not to tell his parents.  His wrist was bruised when he woke up the next morning.

Nick navigates his way across the icy town square and crosses onto the bridge that joins the town to the docks.  In the absence of cars, he treads a line straight down the middle of the road.  The bells of the town hall chime out three a.m. The hour of abandoned streets, of cats screeching behind dustbins, of rapid eye movement and incurable insomnia.  Dead-centre, there is a break in the structure, to allow the bridge to rise upwards on launch days.  Nick hesitates as he steps over the join.  Ben would never have allowed him to stand on the crack.

There were other diversions from normality, too.  A few summers ago, Ben brought his new girlfriend round to Nick’s house.  Nick was excited to meet Amanda, the first steady girlfriend Ben had ever revealed to his brother.  Nick was still with Cara then, and their baby was sleeping in the nursery next door.  As the adults laid down their knives and forks after a successful meal, the baby began to cry.  Ben wiped his mouth carefully on his napkin and left the room.  He returned with a football, sat down on the settee and, without saying a word, began to throw the ball repeatedly against the wall of the nursery.  Cara stared at Nick, who tugged a hand through his hair. and rearranged his plate on the formica table.  The baby screamed louder.  Amanda quietly gathered her handbag and unhooked her coat from the door, and Nick knew that was the last his family would see of her.

The architecture of the dockyard buildings, tall and imposing, instils claustrophobia in Nick and he walks in the centre of the road until the buildings end.  When there is open space again, he breathes a sigh of relief.  Ahead of him is his final destination.

Ben fell hook, line and sinker for the sea.  Growing up on the coast, he headed for the water even when there was snow on the beach.  When he spoke about leaving, it was for coastal cities like Brighton, Melbourne and Gothenburg.  As kids, he and Nick had held their mother’s hand and watched the construction of a playground on the beach.  Steam rose from newly-laid tarmac into the sky like unfurling fronds of fern.  When the playground was finished, Ben was ecstatic to find that the swings faced directly towards the waves.  He spent seven hours with eyes scrunched tight, competing against himself, willing himself higher and higher.

The sea had its own offerings.  Nick was with Ben when they discovered the dead sheep bloated up on the shore, its body jammed against a rock, pebbles threatening to puncture its stretched skin.  Ben crouched at the front of the animal’s head and looked at its face for what seemed like an eternity.  ‘Did you see its eye?’ he asked Nick as they threw stones into the sea several weeks later.

The day he was sectioned for the third time, Ben got a tattoo.  It was voluntary this time, and Ben seemed resigned to the transition.  Nick, feeling guilty at his own inability to manage his brother, had spent the morning trying to please Ben.  He drew up a list of places to visit, and they sat for a while on the swings and talked about everything but the future.  Ben had only one request for the day: a blue swallow inked on the underside of his forearm.  The tattoo was one of Ben’s own designs, which he kept in his wallet and brought out proudly when asked for it.

He returned to the car with a smile on his face and a dressing on his arm.  Halfway home, though, he gripped the steering wheel anxiously and told Nick he’d forgotten something.  They drove back to the tattoo parlour in silence.  Ben was gone only a few minutes this time.  When he got back in the car, he rolled up his sleeve to show Nick the alteration.  He pointed at the swallow’s eye.  The tattooist had added the tiniest pinprick of a pupil.  ‘Can’t believe I forgot that,’ said Ben, his voice weak and maudlin.

Nick ambles onto the rough wasteland of the abandoned docks.  In a concrete bunker, where machine guns peeped and warning sirens peeled out into wartime dawns, he and Ben had smoked their first spliff, giggling like idiots through a long, hazy May Day.  It was then, too, that Ben confessed he’d stopped taking his tablets.  Nick had ignored the niggling instinctive unease he’d felt at this news, unable to reconcile it with the upbeat brother whose company he was finally enjoying.  His parents were furious when they found out Nick had known and hadn’t told anyone.

For the first time since he returned home, Nick feels safe in his surroundings, coddled by the coastline closing in around him.  He tries to jump up onto the bunker and misses, scraping his wrist on the cold concrete.  Blood prickles against the surface of his skin and he sucks at his wrist, tasting iron.

The remaining trees, exposed to the elements, have succumbed into waist-high stumps, like tired statues waiting for the tide.  Nick feels the sudden, unexpected weight of snowfall on his head and he looks up to the sky.  He knows the terrain better than his own body, but the act of looking upwards disorientates him and he stumbles blindly in what he hopes is the right direction.

When he focuses again, he realises he has already crossed the beach and has found the tide.  A thin sheet of ice, that he doesn’t remember walking over, separates him from the land.  The beam of a lighthouse pierces through the snow and makes a kaleidoscope of the sea’s surface.  Tired and hallucinated, Nick rests his boots on the edge of the water.  One last act remains before he can flip the timer over again, turn back and begin anew.  Ben was the storyteller.  He could re-invent anything.

Nick scrutinises the water for his reflection and reaches into his pocket for the tin of ashes.

THE END