'The Silence of Bleakridge' is the third in a sequence of three novels. The other two are 'This Ruined Place' and 'The Rainey Seasons'. These three may be read singly, as 'stand-alone books', or in any order. While this is not a trilogy, each book contains small nudges to the other two, which the interested reader might be pleased to discover.
EXTRACT FROM THE SILENCE OF BLEAKRIDGE
She didn't look up when he came in from wherever he'd been, but stared all the more intently at her book.
'Booze!' he said, swinging a bottle from the neck.
She turned a page; made no reply. He stepped closer, shook the bottle between her and the book.
'Yes? No?'
'Not for me.'
'This is the good stuff.'
She glanced up. 'I don't want any.'
He opened the bottle, poured a glass for himself, silently toasted her bowed head, and carried glass and bottle to the table under the window. He sat down. Looked out. There wasn't much to see this far in from the edge of the hill, especially with the day rapidly ending. A few twitchy pinholes struggling through the darkening fabric of the sky, no moon. The silence creaked behind him. He fought a sigh. Silence would have been fine if he'd been alone, but he wasn't alone and the barricades were getting higher. Soon be insurmountable. As the last of the day's light dissolved, his reflection in the glass established itself, transforming his unremarkably angular face. Hair swept back, eyes a tiny gleam in cavernous sockets, unshaven jaw a depthless black. In the glass he looked younger by ten or twelve years, like a studious terrorist.
Ten or twelve years.
Twelve years ago he'd been an archaeological illustrator producing drawings of excavated artifacts and reconstructions based on limited source material. It wasn't an overcrowded profession, so there was a fair bit of work for a freelance, but the pay was poor, and with Nina's staff nurse salary their only other income they hadn't lived it up much. Hadn't often wanted to. They'd liked being together then, had needed few others and little else. Their silences were companionable. But with a series of cutbacks in archaeological research, the commissions had dried up and he'd been forced to take whatever work he could, a succession of dull jobs that culminated in temporary employment as general dogsbody and laborer with a stonemason. It was during his time there, while holidaying in Italy with Nina, that a chance meeting changed everything, for him if not her. Returning with an unexpected enthusiasm for the properties and possibilities of stone charmed the mason, Ted Slomis, into letting him try his hand at working with it – and he proved a natural. Couldn't put a chisel wrong. When the job eventually folded, he built a rudimentary studio at the back of the house and had blocks of stone delivered on which to develop ideas that were by then coming thick and fast. Nina, almost as fascinated by his progress as he, was at his side when he entered the most exhilarating period of his life, encouraging him in his every experiment, urging him on when doubt overcame him, suggesting areas of innovation when he felt he was becoming repetitive or predictable.
Years on from that time, gazing at the terrorist in the black glass, he recalled that old passion, and life with Nina then. Over his shoulder, within the reflected room, tonight's Nina, four months shy of forty, sat reading by the unlit fire while the young Nina of memory flew about the room like a hyperactive Pre-Raphaelite nymph. All that lustrous hair, a shade brighter than auburn, so long then, so full. As always, the present day had the stronger pull, and spry young Nina, vivacious Nina, danced away into the night while the woman she'd become, waspish of tongue, formidable in her silences, shifted in her chair. Soon she would close her book and go upstairs, and some time later ritual would send him after her. He would climb in beside her and they would lie side by side or with their backs to one another like strangers sharing a bed by accident.
Some nights, usually around 3:00 a.m., he would wake suddenly, struggle for a moment to make sense of the little attic room with its sloping ceiling and low walls, and realize that he needed a pee. He would slide out of bed and pick his way down the narrow staircase. Sometimes, wide awake after the trip to the bathroom, he would remain downstairs for a while, sipping something, drawing perhaps, but more often than not immediately go back up, slip in beside a Nina disgruntled by the sudden tilt of the mattress, and lie longing for sleep to reclaim him. He hated waking in the night. Night was when the whispers came. The terrifying rumors of mortality that would spin him endlessly until the window lightened, whereupon, safe once more, he would fall asleep, exhausted.
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