That Night

by Gillian McAllister

  ‘Police,’ Cathy says under her breath to him. Joe stares at the windows. The Polizia di Stato and the Carabinieri are moving across them, their figures distorted by the uneven glass. Five of them. Hanging around the building. Frannie starts jittering next to him, and he throws her a look.

  They help themselves to breakfast. ‘Just act normally,’ Joe says to Cathy.

  ‘I’m not the one covered in sweat.’

  Joe has a full fry-up every morning, and so he does today too. He adds three sausages and a spoonful of beans from a steaming silver bowl. The plate is warm in his hands. He’s served coffee as he sits with Cathy, Frannie opposite him, Paul in a highchair by her side. Paul has emptied a four-piece wooden puzzle on to the tray of his chair and is intently studying one of the pieces. Joe reaches for it, and Paul grabs urgently, like a dog guarding a ball, says, ‘My,’ and taps his chest. Joe cannot help but feel the slow drip of love for Paul, who mashes together two puzzle pieces, unconcerned and unaware. This is all for you, this is all for you, this is all for you, Joe tells him internally.

  Lydia joins them after a few seconds. He glances at her, that turned-up nose he’s loved for nearly two decades. He wonders what she’d do if he told her. They’ve always identified as over-thinkers. Lydia once said, ‘We’re mad as hatters, we are,’ when they had spent their whole evening worrying about ovulation sticks and a skin rash on a French bulldog, respectively. They’d cackled into their dinner. The next day, a tiny set of worry dolls had arrived at the practice, with a note from Lydia, via Amazon Prime: For your worries, and mine, it had said. But those dolls can’t help him now, and neither can she. This isn’t a worry. This is a real problem.

  ‘I’m tired,’ Joe says, rubbing at his head, trying to explain his behaviour. Cathy’s eyes light on him.

  ‘You were rolling around in bed last night,’ Lydia says, through a mouthful of fruit. ‘Lunatic.’

  ‘I know. I was hot.’

  As he chews on a sausage, his bowels seem to liquefy. He can hardly believe yesterday ended and today came. That a world like this exists. Cathy accepts a cup of tea from a teapot. Joe watches it pour from the spout, a not-quite-cylindrical stream.

  ‘I slept fine,’ Cathy says. Her face is serene. She’s a great actress. Joe can’t help but study her. Is it easy for her?

  ‘I want pancakes,’ Joe says pointedly to her. ‘Do you?’

  ‘Sure,’ she says, scraping her chair back. They walk over to the buffet and stand a few metres away from everybody. Joe ladles the pancake mixture on to the hotplate and glumly watches it. He glances over at Paul. He’s still clutching at the jigsaw pieces. He loves to hold as many things as possible in his fists.

  ‘How do you seem so fine?’ Joe says to Cathy.

  ‘I’m not fine.’

  Joe’s always been a ruminator, even though he tries not to be. He called Evan a twat under his breath at work three weeks ago and has thought about it most days since. Evan had performed an unnecessary scan, the money from which enabled him to hit his financial target, which shouldn’t have been a surprise to Joe, who has always known him to be a tosser. His entire personality is formed around the fact that he one day wants to own a Maserati, when, actually, he is flat broke following his divorce. He uses myself when he means me. So, he is a twat. But still.

  He wishes he could be a pragmatist, like Cathy.

  ‘I couldn’t sleep,’ she says in a low voice, eyes down to the buffet, ostensibly looking at the pancake batter swirling in a vat. ‘All right? I slept fucking terribly.’

  ‘Did you dream?’ Joe says.

  ‘Yup,’ Cathy says. She smiles sadly as their eyes meet, an eerie feeling settling over Joe of dreaming the same dream as his sister. ‘You?’

  ‘Yeah, arrests, mostly,’ Joe says, prodding at the pancake, wishing he did have his worry dolls, after all, if only to confide in. It’s so funny how the sky is still so blue, Paul still loves holding things in his tiny fat fists, pancakes still cook, in this, the afterlife.

  ‘Mine were about him.’ Cathy bites her lip and looks to her left.

  ‘What about him?’ Joe says.

  But that is as far as Cathy is willing to go. She shrugs, biting at the edge of her thumbnail, and doesn’t answer.

  He glances over at Paul as he thinks it and wonders if, when it finally comes out, Lydia will look back on this holiday and be able to pinpoint the day. The day he stopped sleeping. The day everything changed. Would she forgive him? For the initial act, and then for the secrecy? He skews his mouth to the side as he ponders it. Yes and no, he decides. Lydia is tidy in both a physical and a mental way. If people piss her off, they’re gone. She could forgive a crime but not a lie. She’s not only estranged from all of her family but from several friends too, a direct result of her childhood.

  Cathy’s body language changes. She stiffens. ‘There are eight police now, in the foyer,’ she says, her brown eyes searching over Joe’s shoulder. ‘Don’t look.’

  ‘How can I not look?’ Joe says, wanting to turn around.

  ‘You said about the market, didn’t you?’ Cathy asks quietly. ‘I’ve been meaning to ask.’ She turns the pancake. Everything about her body language is a study in nonchalance, weight on one hip, but Joe knows her well enough to spot where the edges aren’t quite sanded down. Her shoulders are a millimetre higher than normal.

  ‘No,’ Joe says, shocked. ‘I didn’t.’ He blushes with the shame of it, a micro-betrayal already. But who wouldn’t try to protect themselves in the situation he finds himself in?

  ‘What?’ she says. ‘You didn’t say about the market, to the police. That Frannie saw Will?’

  ‘No?’ Joe says again, not offering an explanation.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I just figured it was better to omit everything.’

  ‘But I said you were there, Joe.’

  Joe goes cold. ‘I didn’t think. What do we do? Do we clarify it?’

  ‘No,’ Cathy hisses, drumming her fingers against her lips. ‘Okay – you didn’t actually see him at the market, did you?’ she says. ‘Just – from afar?’

  ‘No, he was pretty close to me.’

  ‘Joe.’

  ‘Right – I see. Okay. No. No, I didn’t see him.’

  ‘So if they ask – which they won’t’ – she looks at him sharply – ‘we say that.’

  The feeling of his t-shirt being too tight again descends on Joe. He’s lied to the police and now he has hidden his true motivation from his sister, and she, altruistic Cathy, is trying to get him out of it.

  She stares at him, saying nothing. He wonders if she knows, if she knows he tried to extricate himself from the blame in the interview room. She has so much power over him. She could call up the police, right now, and say, My brother lied. The vulnerability of each of them strikes him. Adrenaline begins pumping. What the fuck’s happening to him?

  He’s going mad. He can’t get any air. He gulps. He’s breathing, he thinks he’s breathing, but it doesn’t feel like he is. What the fuck, what the fuck, what the fuck? He leans forward, his hands on the table. The pancakes are two round shapes in front of him, filling his entire field of vision. Pancakes and panic. ‘I can’t breathe,’ he says to Cathy.

  She looks at him gently. ‘You are breathing,’ she says in a low voice.

  ‘I can’t do it. I’m going to die,’ he says. His chest is tight. He really can’t breathe. He really actually is not breathing.

  ‘All right, come on, out of here,’ Cathy says calmly. She leads him out of the dining area, through the fire door at the back, propped open so it lets a rectangle of sunshine in. Joe holds up a hand to Lydia, telling her he’ll be back soon. They stand there together. ‘In for five,’ Cathy says, her eyes on Joe’s.

  Is he breathing? How would he know? Will he ever feel normal again?

  ‘Out for seven,’ she says.

  ‘I don’t have seven.’

  ‘This will pass,’ she says nicely. ‘Okay?’

&nb
sp; ‘No, this one is different.’

  ‘You always say that.’

  ‘We’ve kil–’

  ‘Stop. Breathe.’

  Already, Joe can feel the adrenaline burning dry, like a kettle boiling empty and switching off. There’s nothing more in him. His limbs feel exhausted.

  Panic attacks. He’s had them before. Hundreds of them. Cathy’s the best person to talk him down from them, not because she takes them seriously but because she doesn’t give them credence, doesn’t fear them like he does.

  ‘In for five,’ she says calmly, a half-smile playing across her features. ‘Some things don’t change,’ she adds.

  She leans a hand on the bar of the fire door and glances over her shoulder, inside. ‘Pancakes have burned.’

  A car door slams around the side of the building where the main entrance is. It’s a white-stone building, almost too bright to look at. Snowflakes dance in Joe’s vision when he tries. The palette of the day is a royal-blue and clean, intense white. It helps, the contrast between this and the brown and the red of the night before last.

  Another car door. A dull, metallic thump. Joe turns instinctively towards the noise. He can’t see, so he looks at Cathy, waiting for a clue. She is staring just behind his shoulder again. She’s lit up by the sun, her skin peach-coloured, her hair caramel, eyes a bright oak. But it’s her expression he can’t stop looking at. Eyebrows drawn together. Mouth slack.

  ‘Don’t look,’ she says in just a whisper. He turns around anyway. His muscles are tensed, ready.

  ‘What? The police?’ he says, looking back at Cathy. She brings a hand to her mouth.

  ‘No.’

  ‘What?’

  Joe steps back, joining her. They stand there, together, side by side, and stare.

  ‘Cane corsos,’ Cathy says. A breed of sniffer dog.

  25.

  Joe

  There are tens of them, the cadaver dogs. Each on a lead, each with a police officer, each straining to go. They’re large, black dogs, like a Staffordshire bull terrier but on taller legs. Joe treated one, last year, brought in by a Spanish man who lived in Kings Heath. It had eaten the skin of a tennis ball, according to the man, in one whole gulp. He’d made the noise of it, the gulp. Unk. The dog needed a big operation. Recovered well. He could smell Joe coming through the prep room into the dog ward. He would always be looking up when he arrived, nose quivering.

  Joe can’t stop staring at them. Lydia is probably wondering where they are, but he doesn’t care. He’s transfixed by the spectacle of the dogs, like a herd coming together. Yet more are being let out of yet more police cars. There must be twenty of them.

  Joe turns to look at Cathy. Together, they go around to the front of the building. They are acting suspiciously, but they can’t help it. They stand next to an orange tree that is so perfect and round it looks fake, the oranges hanging like lanterns. Joe lights up a roll-up.

  He tries to look natural as the police file past. Then the media, news reporters with fluffy microphones looking for soundbites, looking for suspects. The pretence of all this. He’s going to have to keep it up forever. He can barely stand the thought of it.

  ‘We wanted this,’ he says to Cathy in a low voice when they’ve gone.

  ‘I know.’

  She looks ashen now in the bright sunlight. She makes a flicking gesture with her fingers, and he hands her the cigarette he’s rolled, though she doesn’t smoke. He lights it for her while it’s in her mouth, both of them trying to manage with shaking hands. Their eyes meet, his face close to hers, but neither of them speaks.

  ‘Do you regret answering?’ he asks her.

  She knows exactly what he means. She always does. Whether she will confide is another matter. ‘No,’ she says. ‘No.’ She shrugs. ‘It’s Frannie.’

  The police are letting the dogs off their leads and into the distance. Their tails are up. They block the sun, light and shadow, light and shadow, as they move towards the horizon.

  ‘They can’t smell below six feet,’ Cathy says quietly, when the police are out of earshot, and they’re alone again. ‘We thought it through.’

  ‘The blood,’ he mumbles around his cigarette.

  ‘Just have to hope she’s cleaned it up.’ Cathy holds her cigarette between her middle and ring fingers, close to the knuckle, like a seasoned smoker. When she puffs on it, her face is right next to her hand. ‘You look like a Mafia boss,’ Joe says with a tiny laugh borne out of a manic kind of anxiety at the situation they find themselves in rather than anything light.

  Cathy throws him a wan smile.

  Joe finishes the cigarette and scuffs it out in the dirt. His legs feel like he has been exercising, the muscles trembling with fear.

  ‘There’s no way we haven’t got his smell on us. On our drive … our clothes,’ Joe says, thinking aloud. ‘Can’t those dogs smell a treat about a mile off? I operated on one once, and he knew exactly where I was at all times.’

  ‘I’ve washed all the clothes,’ Cathy says. ‘Don’t worry. I’ve taken care of it. They are trained to smell decomposition. He was … he’d only just died. I think the scent is different.’

  Joe nods. Relief rushes up through him. She’s got it. She’ll sort it. ‘You’re so fucking smart,’ he says to Cathy. ‘Can’t believe you’ve never found someone.’

  He’s astonished when Cathy takes an actual step back from him. ‘What?’ she says, her voice just a whisper.

  He blushes. He allowed his relief at her knowledge, at how in control she is, to let him run his mouth. ‘You know,’ he stammers, ‘just – a, you know, a nice man to share your life with.’

  ‘I haven’t not found someone,’ she says, making air quotes.

  ‘Sorry,’ Joe says uselessly. ‘Ignore me.’

  Cathy does. They stare into the distance, the air hazy and shimmering with the heat, both thinking.

  Perhaps Will was here before he unthinkingly, unknowingly, walked to his death. What was he doing, walking on that road towards their villa late at night? The man that his sister killed before the mystery could be solved, a man dying with his own secrets intact, like an unopened box sent out to sea.

  Cathy breathes out cigarette smoke into the summer air like icing sugar, then turns to look at him. ‘It’ll be okay.’

  ‘I feel like we need more of a plan,’ he says. He thinks for a second. What would his dad do? What would his dad want him to do? ‘There’s a hotline, isn’t there?’ Joe says. ‘That you can text in.’

  ‘7070. It was on the news. Why?’

  ‘What if we said we’d seen him?’

  Cathy understands his meaning immediately. ‘But not us,’ she says.

  ‘Get a pay-as-you-go phone. And text in. Say we saw him today.’

  She seems to shiver in the sunlight, her shoulders rising up as she turns away from him and breathes smoke out of the side of her mouth. ‘Up to you,’ she says. ‘I feel like we should maybe leave it for now.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I just think – the cashpoint stuff … you know? We dodged a bullet there.’

  ‘Yeah. Maybe. Stop playing with fire,’ Joe says softly, looking at the amber tip of his cigarette, slowly turning to ash, orange to grey like a fast cremation.

  ‘Exactly. And … I don’t know.’ Cathy scuffs the ground with the toe of her trainer. ‘It’s just – I don’t know. It’s all a bit distasteful, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yeah, I think we’ve really crossed the Rubicon with distasteful,’ Joe says drily.

  ‘Maybe,’ Cathy says.

  They stand in silence for a few minutes more.

  ‘She said she couldn’t stop,’ Cathy says, so quietly he has to strain to hear.

  ‘I know.’

  They stop speaking, letting the words and the suspicion hang in the air between them.

  ‘Cath,’ he says quietly now.

  ‘Yeah?’ She looks up at him, round brown eyes concerned.

  ‘Would you have done the same for me?’


  Cathy waits a beat, still looking at him. ‘Of course,’ she says. She waits a second, seemingly thinking, then adds: ‘Of course I would. I am.’ She doesn’t ask the question back.

  ‘You are?’

  ‘I am keeping your crimes a secret,’ she says simply.

  Joe takes out another cigarette and offers one to Cathy. She takes it, unlit, holds it until she has finished the previous one. Joe lights them both, then plays with the lighter, pulling and pulling on the little wheel, looking at the small, contained fire that pops up, and is easily put out, over and over again.

  She is keeping their crimes a secret. The beginning of the crime doesn’t matter, because of the ones they have committed along the way, like a train that just goes all night, on a loop, with no end or beginning, so nobody remembers where it came from.

  ‘It’s about Paul,’ Cathy says quickly. ‘For Frannie.’

  ‘I know,’ Joe says, smiling a sad half-smile as he thinks of how Paul is terrified of his own reflection in the mirror. Joe can’t wait for him to realize it is himself, for that wide-open toothy smile to break. ‘And it’s about Rosie. Isn’t it?’ he asks, wanting to talk about it, even though it’s a place they hardly ever go to.

  ‘It’s absolutely about Rosie,’ Cathy says, surprising him.

  26.

  Now

  Jason’s Office, early March, 5.00 p.m.

  ‘Ms Plant,’ Jason says with a nod as I arrive for my session.

  I say nothing, sitting down opposite him. I know I’ve avoided it long enough now. I cross my feet at their ankles.

  Jason is in jeans and a jumper today, dressed casually with no explanation. He rubs at his left eye with his index finger as he gazes down at some papers. ‘How are you feeling?’ he says, kind of listlessly, it seems to me.

  ‘You know,’ I say. ‘Up and down.’

  Outside, I hear the hiss of a bus pulling away. We’re into March, though the weather isn’t yet warming up. Somehow, the turn of the year from February to March seems to have focused both of our minds.

  ‘Right, we need to get to it,’ Jason says crisply.