Guilty One (16 page)

Daniel waited for a moment, breathing hard. The shriek of the chickens behind him made the hairs stand up on his arms. Slowly, methodically, as if he was folding socks, Daniel tried to tear one wing from the chicken. Its open beak and frantic tongue appalled him and so he broke its neck. He leaned on the chicken and pulled its head away from its body.

The chicken was still, blood in its bead eye.

Daniel tripped as he left the run. He fell on his elbows and the chicken blood on his hands touched his face. He got up and walked into the house with the blood on his cheek and the feathers of the bird he had killed still clinging to his trainers and fingers.

She was awake and filling the kettle when he entered. She was standing with her back to him, her dirty dressing gown hanging to her calves. She had the radio on and was humming to a pop song. He first thought to start up the stairs to the bathroom but found
himself rooted to the spot. He wanted her to turn and see him, soiled with his violence.

‘What on earth?’ she said, with a smile on her face, when she turned.

Maybe it was the feather that clung to his trainer or the bright yellow of the yolk that was now smeared on his cheek with the chicken’s blood. Minnie’s lips tightened and she pushed past him out into the yard. He watched her from the back door as she stood with one hand over her mouth at the entrance to the shed.

She came back in the house and he watched her face for rage, horror, disappointment. She wouldn’t look at him. She thumped up the stairs and appeared moments later in her grey skirt and her man’s boots and the old sweatshirt that she wore when she was cleaning. He stood right at the bottom of the stairs, the egg and blood drying on his hands, making the skin tight and dry. He stood in her path, expecting punishment, wanting punishment.

She stopped at the foot of the stairs and looked at him for the first time.

‘Clean yourself up,’ was all she said.

She pushed past him again and out into the yard.

From the bathroom window, he watched her collecting the broken shells and soiled straw. He scrubbed his hands and face then stood watching her work. He took the feather from his trainer and stood looking out of the window, holding it between finger and thumb. He let the feather fall, dizzy but trusting, into the wind, as he saw her making her way back to the house. She carried the dead chicken by its feet. The neck of the chicken swung loose with every step she took.

He stayed
upstairs, under the bedcovers, then in the cupboard as she worked downstairs. His stomach began to rumble as the heat and energy of the morning left him. He felt cold and pulled his cuffs over his hands. He stepped out of the cupboard and stood looking at himself in the mirror he had cracked only a week before.

Evil little bastard,
he remembered again. He looked at his face, the fragments of it mismatched. He felt his heart beat harder. He stood at the top of the stairs and then sat down there, listening to the sounds she was making in the kitchen. Blitz made his way upstairs and stood panting, looking at him. Daniel reached up to stroke the dog’s velvet ears. Blitz allowed it for a moment, then turned and made his way back downstairs. Daniel edged forward, on to the middle step, then to the bottom where he stood holding onto the post of the banister. It was ten minutes before he mustered the courage to stand at the door of the kitchen.

‘I don’t even want to look at you,’ she said, still with her back turned to him.

‘Are you angry?’

‘No, Danny,’ she said, turning round to face him. She stood with tight lips and her chest puffed out. ‘But I feel very sad. Very sad indeed.’

Her eyes were a fierce, intense blue and watery and too wide. Her face seemed to loom before him, even though she was standing on the other side of the kitchen. Daniel sighed and hung his head.

She pulled out a chair for him.

‘Sit there. I have a job for you.’

He sat where she asked. She brought a large chopping board with the dead chicken on it and placed it before him.

‘Here’s what
you do,’ she said, holding the chicken roughly and ripping the feathers from it. She tore and tore again and soon there was a bare patch of skin, pimpled and white.

‘This murdered bird is our dinner,’ she said. ‘We need it plucked before we can gut it and roast it.’

Minnie stood over him and watched as he took a grasp of the soft feathers, the red of them giving to grey at the root as he pulled them into his fist.

‘Rip,’ she said, ‘rip hard.’

Daniel pulled too hard and the skin came away with the feathers, leaving a scalded mark on the flesh.

‘Like this,’ she said, pushing his hand away and tearing off a clutch of feathers again, leaving the soft white, pimpled skin beneath. ‘Can you do that?’

Daniel was embarrassed to feel his throat tighten and his eyes moisten. He nodded and opened his mouth to speak to her.

‘I don’t want to,’ he said, in a whisper.

‘She didn’t want to die, but you crippled her and then killed her. Do it, do it right now.’

She had her back to him and as she spoke she slammed a glass on to the wooden work surface. Daniel heard the chink, klink of her ice cubes and the weak peeing sound of the Jif lemon, which she added when she didn’t have money or mind for real lemons. The sobering heaviness of the gin bottle being uncapped caused Daniel to shiver and he did as she asked. More gently this time, he gripped the feathers of the bird and ripped. The sudden baldness of the bird was startling.

When the bird was plucked, Daniel sat with feathers sticking to his fingers and the pimpled chicken before him. He wanted to leave,
to run outside and across the Dandy and twirl the swings away from the little children. He wanted to return to the wardrobe, to feel its close, dark embrace. The smell of the plucked dead chicken made him feel sick.

Minnie took the bird and cut it from between its thighs. It was a rough, hard slit and Daniel could feel the strength that she put into it. She reached inside and Daniel watched her thick, red hand disappear.

‘You have to reach up inside, as far as you can until you can feel the solid lump – the gizzard. Get a firm grip on that and pull, gently and slowly. Everything should come out together, mind. Here! You try, I don’t want to do it for you.’

‘I don’t want to.’ Daniel heard his own voice as whining.

‘Don’t be a baby.’ She had never scorned him before, but he heard that in her voice now.

Leaning over the sink, the basin trembling beneath him, Daniel inserted his hand into the bloody insides of the chicken.

‘Don’t worry too much about the lungs,’ Minnie said. ‘They tend to stay stuck to the carcass.’

Daniel felt sick but he tried to grab the warm entrails and pull them. With each pull his own stomach tightened and bile rose in his throat. When finally he was able to pull forth the dark red slime, he stepped back as his own guts spewed on to the floor along with the bird’s.

Daniel bent over and vomited on to the kitchen floor. He had not eaten, and so his vomit was thin, yellow liquid that splashed on to the guts of the bird.

‘It’s all right,’ said Minnie. ‘I’ll sort it. You go and clean yourself up.’

*

In
the bathroom, Daniel dry-heaved into the bowl, then sat slumped against the wall. The butterfly smiled at him from the shelf. He felt wretched. He felt like a snail cut from its shell. He washed his face in cool water and dried it with a face cloth, then brushed his teeth until the taste of the sick was gone.

He waited a few minutes before going back into the kitchen. He felt strange, as if he didn’t want to leave the bathroom. He felt like he did in the bathroom at home when one of them was hurting his mother. He had the same dark soup of scared in his stomach and the same itch in his muscles.

Carefully, Daniel unlocked the door and stood at the top of the stairs. He went to bed with his clothes on, but didn’t sleep. He listened intently to the sounds of her in the kitchen. The oven opening and closing, her footsteps crossing the floor, her words to Blitz and then the sound of Blitz’s food being poured into his bowl.

‘You were up there for ages,’ Minnie said when she saw him. ‘I was almost coming up after you. It’s after two, and you haven’t had any breakfast. Are you hungry now?’

Daniel shook his head.

‘But you’ll eat. Sit down.’

Daniel sat at the table and looked at the dumb placemat with a pony on it.

She had roasted the chicken and carved it. Slices of breast sat on his plate next to the tinned sweetcorn and boiled potatoes.

‘Eat it.’

‘Don’t want it.’

‘You’ll eat it.’

‘I don’t want it.’ He pushed his plate away.

‘You can
murder it, so you’ll take responsibility. You’ll eat it. You’ll know it’s dead and its goodness is inside you.’

‘I won’t eat it.’

‘You’ll sit here and I’ll sit here until you’ve eaten it.’ Minnie placed her drink hard on the table. The ice shuddered in protest.

They sat until her drink finished. He thought she would get up and refill it and that would have been his cue to leave, but she let the glass lie dry before her. She looked at him and blinked slowly. Time started to grow on them, like moss on the stones in the yard. Daniel looked at the cold chicken and vegetables on the plate and wondered if he could swallow them like pills.

‘What if I eat the vegetables, like?’

‘You’re a bright lad, so why do you ask that? You know I don’t care if you touch the vegetables, but I’ll have you eat every morsel of the bird that you killed. Those birds are my living, but that’s not why I’m angry. You know I eat the birds when it’s their time. I care for them and love them and yes, we do eat them, but they are killed in a proper way, not out of violence, not out of hate or anger. This one’s dead and we won’t waste it, but I want you to know it’s dead because of you, because of what you did. If it weren’t we would have its eggs tomorrow. I know that you’ve had a hard time, Danny, and any time you like you can talk to me about it. I know you’re angry and you’ve a right to be. I’ll do my best to help you, but I can’t have you killing my birds every time you feel bad.’

Daniel began to cry. He cried like a child smaller than he was, slumped in the chair and quietly humming his sadness over a wet lip. He put a hand over his eyes so that he didn’t have to look at her.

When
he stopped crying, he opened his eyes and took breath after new clean breath. She was still before him with her empty glass and her steel-blue eyes fixed on him.

‘Calm down, that’s it. Get your breath back and eat it up.’

Defeated, Daniel
sat up and began to cut the
chicken. He cut a very small piece and set it on his fork. He let the meat touch his
tongue and then took it into his mouth.

Guilt

13

Daniel looked
at the clock and saw that it was nearly 3 a.m. A cool blue light filtered into the room. He couldn’t tell if it was the moon or the streetlamps below which caused the chill, austere glow. He had worked until ten, eaten at his desk and then gone to the Crown for a pint on his way home. Casual strips of desire whipped him, but the stress of the day had left him empty and he felt light as he turned and turned again in its wake.

In the near dark, he lay on his back with his hands behind his head. He thought about the years of anger towards Minnie that had folded into years of disregard. This had been his defence against her, he realised: anger and disregard. Now that she was dead his anger was still there, but set adrift. Half asleep, he watched it float and turn.

He had chosen to leave her all those years ago and now it was hard for him to grieve for her. To grieve he had to remember, and remembering was grief. In the half-dark he blinked as he remembered graduating and his first few years as a lawyer in London. All this had been without her. He had felt proud of his self-sufficiency. After he cut her off, he had paid his own way through university and then got a job at a firm in London, only three months
after graduating. He had taken credit for this, but now, in the near dark, he was honest enough to wonder if he would have gone to university at all had it not been for Minnie.

He felt darkness circling around him and alighting on his chest, hooded, wicked, shining black like a raven. Daniel put a palm to his bare chest, as if to relieve the sting of the claws.

He
had left
her,
yet her leaving still seemed the greater. As he turned and turned again he felt the death beyond the loss which he had created. Her death was heavier, dark, like a bird of prey against the night sky.

Ten past three.

With his mouth and eyes open, Daniel remembered killing the chicken. He remembered his child’s hands throttling the bird that she held dear. He sat up and swung his legs out of the bed. He sat there in the half-dark, his body curved over his knees. Because there was nothing else that would stop it, he pulled on his shorts, stepped into his trainers and went running.

Four o’clock when he checked his watch. The early autumn morning was warm and fresh against his face. He could smell the water from the fountain when he ran past it, and then the dewy leaves of the trees. The pounding of his feet on the path and the warming of his muscles energised him and he ran faster than he usually would, lengthening his stride and allowing his torso to drive him forward. Even at this pace, images came to him, causing him to lose concentration: he saw again her coffin; Minnie with her wellies on and her hands on her hips, cheeks reddened by the wind; Blitz bowing his head deferentially when she entered the room; the market stall stacked with
fresh eggs; his childhood bedroom with the rosebud wallpaper.

He had been wild. Who else but Minnie would have taken on such a child? His social worker had warned him. Minnie had cared for him when no one else would.

Although he was already breathing hard, Daniel ran faster. He felt heat in his stomach muscles and his thighs. A stitch seared along his side and he slowed to accommodate it, but didn’t stop. He took longer, slower breaths as he had been taught, yet the stitch remained. In the darkness of the park, indigents shifted on cold benches, newspaper fluttering over their faces. His mind was torn between the pain in his side and the reluctant ache that came whenever he thought of Minnie. She had been the guilty one, but, accused at her funeral, he now considered his own part in her death. He had intended to hurt her, after all. He had been aware of punishing her. She had deserved it.