Benighted (41 page)

FORTY-FOUR

N
obody stops me when I leave the building. I walk, I don’t look up at street signs or study the faces of people I pass. I walk with a dull, swift stride that carries me along, the streets flowing past me at such a steady speed that it seems they’d keep flowing if I stopped walking. I walk all the way to the church and go in, but I don’t know which saint to talk to.

There’s a graveyard surrounding the church, a little one, where the headstones tell the dates of birth but not the conditions, and we all lie buried together.

A beam of winter sunlight stands before me, slanting in golden from outside. My hands glow under it, radiant.

The dead lie around me. The maggots are stealing away the last of their flesh.

The stickiness of birth. The jelly and whey where the soft-boned baby nestles. It must have got all over his hands.

If I tried to turn my baby within me, I’d have broken her limbs. She would have twisted and shrunk into a stone inside me, she would never have got out. We would have sunk together. How many women were pulled under the surface, all those centuries, by their dying, fractured babies?

It must have taken a lot of murders to get it right.

There will be injections now. Clean needles, scrubbed fingers. Tainting the water inside women like cooks seasoning a broth. Choking the baby in its unresisting mother for a few, measured seconds. Just long enough for a little part of its soft white brain to die.

I wonder how many adults there are in wheelchairs, in nursing homes, from days when the doctors got the timing a little wrong. What if there were only a few, only five, only ten? If they could meet, what would they say to each other?

Sunlight lies warm in my lap. It won’t be long till spring.

I think about a lot of things, sitting with a lap full of light. I think about the dead, the barebacks who lost too much blood on one too many moon nights and the lyco prisoners who died in custody. I think about prison, and about hell. I think about Parkinson’s soft skin and sure hands. About Ann. I think about the look on William Jones’s face when he told me that it was all over. The look on Ally’s face when I kicked him and ran down the stairs. The look on the face of Marty’s mother, while her son lay mute in the hospital with his throat torn out. And I think again about Parkinson’s smooth, calm, obliging expression as he moved through his hospital.

I think about murder, about falling victim to it and about committing it. For a while I wonder whether Parkinson deserves to live. I remember the bruise on my hand when the gun kicked back and slammed a bullet into Darryl Seligmann, and the way he curled around his wounded leg like a child.

Mostly, I think about getting away with things.

Back in my apartment, the tiny rooms gape around me, full of empty space. I stare ahead of me, watching the daylight fade on the walls. Despite the sounds from the other units, above, below, around me, silence fills the place from floor to ceiling.

I sit alone on the sofa, as if I was the only person in the world. Stupidly, I wish for Paul. I’m tired and I’d like someone to lean against, but that’s gone. Probably I’ll never see him again. Perhaps this is it, I think, perhaps this is the rest of my life. Knowledge I can do nothing with, my tongue stilled with a little money and my freedom, which I can use to sit alone in quiet rooms.

The people who know about Parkinson would probably all fit into my living room. I could serve them drinks. Or he could, because he knows them all, he’s safe. There’s nobody outside his charmed circle except me who knows what he’s done. The fortunate ones can be trusted because they’re part of him, they’ll stay together, and I can be relied on, or can be disposed of.

The knowledge of what he’s done sits beside me on the sofa, heavy and watchful.

For a day, I avoid work. I stay in bed, bury my head, sleep when I can. I don’t dream.

After that, I get up. I brush my hair, wash my face, and clean the water away with a towel, I tidy my clothes and put on my shoes and walk out of my door. My neighbor Mrs. Kitney stops me as I go out, wide-eyed: she’s heard I’m a heroine. I say, “Good morning,” quietly.

“It must have been terrifying,” she sighs.

I incline my head, a long way away from her.

“Everyone’s talking about how brave you’ve been, Lola,” she discloses.

“Oh.” I pull on my gloves, one finger at a time.

“Tell me, weren’t you scared?” She’s standing in the hallway with a piece of gossip. She must be desperate to know.

“I couldn’t say.” I give her a slow, distant nod. “Good morning, Mrs. Kitney.”

I walk to the bus stop, I stand on the bus, I walk quietly into work. There will be files already on my desk, I know. New cases. Citizens who failed to make it to lock-up. Abandoned children. Homeless men who dozed off before moonrise and woke to find themselves in a different world. I shall sort through them, I shall do it by the book, put my fellow citizens gently into one tray or another, let their lives slip in and out of my hands and tidy them back into the system. It will be simple, easy, and it won’t always be wrong.

My face is pale and still as a stone saint’s as I walk the corridors.

I would make it into my office, except that as I ascend, I see Paul coming the other way. His face is unbruised now, his clothes are clean, he’s well. He looks like he did when we first met. I stop still, my hands press together, and I stand looking at him, making no sound, breathing in and out.

He looks up and sees me, and my calm crackles over. “What are you doing here?” I sound hoarse, slapped.

Paul makes an awkward gesture. “I came in to see about Jerry Farnham. Remember? Your alcoholic client. I’m still his social worker.”

Jerry, the reason we met. “I haven’t heard anything about him. He was arrested and put in the cells last I heard.”

“I know.” He stands very still. “Someone else took over his case. I came to see about getting him released.” He sounds almost as if that could be a problem, someone taking my case from me without my knowledge, as if I was still not past caring about it.

“I see.” I lower my head. One of us will have to walk away if this is going to end.

“Lola…” I don’t look up. “Can I talk to you?”

Sadness is dragging at my hands and heels like running weights. “Let’s go in my office.”

He follows me in. I sit on one side of the desk, he sits opposite me on the other. A lot of me wants to dismiss this, to say, We don’t have anything to talk about, but we do. It could finish in silence and absence, but I need to talk to him, even if I don’t have anything to say. I sit and fold my hands together, look down at my desk.

Paul looks to and fro, as if the right thing to say was hidden somewhere in the room, tucked between the files on my shelves. Finally he goes still again and says, “We can’t just end it like this.”

“I know.”

There’s a silence. We both sit quietly, looking at each other’s hands.

I thought he’d break it first, but it’s me who speaks. “Are you all right?”

He shrugs. He knows I’m talking about the cells, the deprivation, the beatings. “I will be.”

My voice stutters a little, but it isn’t nerves; the words are heavy in my mouth. “A-are you seeing a counsellor? A lot of people do.” After we finish with them.

He turns his head aside, half shaking it. “Not exactly. Friend of mine at work’s a counsellor. I’ve been spending a lot of evenings at his place.”

“I’ve gone home,” I say. “I’ve moved back into my own apartment. I’m happier in my own place.”

“I miss you,” he says. It stops me, makes me go still. He doesn’t say it as a plea, there are no requests or plans in it, just a flat statement. “You were in my apartment all the time before I got arrested.” He says “arrested” calmly. He’s brave. “When I’m back there now I keep remembering how used I was to having you around.”

“I’m sorry,” I say. There aren’t any other words.

He looks up at me, as if weighing what he says. “Listen. If I’d told you, if you’d known before it all happened that I did this with my friends…I know what you think of curfew breakers. When they arrested me. If you’d known I was one of them, would you have helped me?”

I have to answer with the truth. This is a question that I’ll hear all my life. It almost seems fitting to say no, to put back the old fences, get behind the bareback name and fight off the world. I think, and I imagine it, put myself into a different past. “Yes,” I say, and I believe it’s true.

He looks at me, looks away. “Did you think I was in on killing your friend?”

I go back to that time, feel it through. “I think—I thought you might have been.” He shifts, raises an eyebrow, and I have to explain. “That was as bad as being sure. I’d trusted you. I don’t often trust people, but I trusted you.”

“Did you love me?”

“Yes.” I don’t have to think for a moment before I say that. I feel soaked through with sadness, exhausted with sadness, but there’s a freedom somewhere, a sense of calm. We’re telling each other the truth, we can ask each other anything. A sharp-edged spring is loosening inside me. “Did you love me?”

“Yes.”

“You said you did in the cells. Did you mean it then?”

“Yes,” he says. He says the word slowly, but there’s no pause before saying it. Afterward, though, there’s a silence, we’re both too tired to push forward.

“I heard you caught the killer,” Paul says.

“Where did you hear it?”

“I—I spoke to your sister.”

I look up, but I’m beyond surprise. “Did you call her?”

He shakes his head, turning it slowly. “No, she called me. She called my department at work and asked around till she found me.”

Without knowing why she did it, I think of Becca and remember that I love her. “What did she want?”

“She was worried about you.”

“Why did she call you?”

He gestures, raising his hand. “She wanted to know what was really going on, I think. She’s a nice lady, your sister. It’s too bad you never introduced us.”

“You’d probably like each other,” I say. I can picture them talking, and I can see now that they’d get on.

“She said you found him by yourself, that you defended yourself when he came at you and you brought him in.”

“He didn’t come at me.” I stop speaking, let the sentence fall. “I just shot him.”

Paul doesn’t answer.

“Do you know where I was the morning before I shot him? I was in church. I was on my knees praying to Our Lady.”

Paul looks down. “Well.”

I tuck my chin down on my hands, clasping each other for comfort.

“Were you trying to kill him?” I look up, look at him properly, see his bright blue eyes gazing at me.

“No.” I keep looking, take a deep breath. “No. I don’t think I’m really a killer.” Whatever he says to that, I feel like I’m saying a base-note truth about myself.

“I never thought you were.”

I want to know. “Did you ever think that I’d hurt you, while you were down in the cells?”

“No.”

“I was trying to wound him,” I say. “Not just because I knew he could overpower me if I tried to arrest him by myself. I was trying to wound him.”

“Still telling harsh truths,” Paul says.

There’s a pause, we sit opposite each other.

“What do you want, Paul?”

He runs his lower lip through his teeth, sits back in his chair. “I’m not over you,” he says.

“Oh.” I have absolutely no answer to that.

He shakes his head, says again, “I’m not over you.”

It isn’t I love you, it isn’t I forgive you. It doesn’t mean either of those things. I try to ask the question, I have to think for a while about how to put it so it isn’t a request. “Will you ever forgive me for what happened?”

He shakes his head. “I—I don’t know. I don’t think much in terms of forgiveness, I guess.”

“That’s not very Christian,” I say.

“You’re the one who was praying. I…God, I don’t know. I miss you. That isn’t about whether I forgive you or not. I lied to you, so you didn’t help me. Now—things aren’t settled. I don’t know.”

Things aren’t settled. He doesn’t know. I don’t know what to say to him.

“Listen,” he says. “Where are you in all this?”

I shake my head, open my mouth, but nothing comes out.

“If you had your wish, what would you want to happen?”

I don’t know what I want now. Everything is gone. I look at him, talk normally, as if this was just a conversation. “I wish things could be the way they were before you got arrested and everything happened.”

He looks at me to see if I mean it, then says, “So do I.”

I keep my hands away from him, I don’t reach out. “What do you want?” I say.

“I miss how things were.”

“That’s how you feel. It isn’t what you want.” The look he gives me is almost wry. I guess he was used to me doing things the hard way. The blood runs through my veins cool as tap water, and I can’t remember how to find things funny.

“I’ve done some bad things.” I speak again before he can answer me. “Worse than you know. And I know things worse than you know as well. I’m not a real person anymore.”

“You look real enough to me.” His expression isn’t quite patient.