by Medina, KT
She felt her breath catch in her throat. ‘Why did you take it?’
‘Because I wanted it.’
‘A dead man’s things? That’s sick.’
‘It wasn’t like that.’
‘It’s sick, Alex.’
‘Are you still in love with him, Tess?’ he mumbled.
Staring straight past him to the slick black snake of river in front of them, to the black trees on the far bank hanging heavy in the hot night air, she knew exactly what the answer was.
‘No.’ She formed the word, but no sound came out. ‘No, I’m not. But . . . it was complicated.’
Twisting on to his side, Alex reached out suddenly and laid a warm hand on her arm. Tess shivered.
‘He loved you so much. I was jealous of him. I wanted to love someone like you.’ He trailed his thumb over her skin. She knew that she should pull her arm away, that this was going somewhere she couldn’t afford to go, not with him. But she didn’t move away. ‘Buddhists believe that everyone has an aura,’ she heard him say. ‘The colour that your body exudes which tells everyone what kind of a person you are. Blue is happy, pink is loving.’ He twisted a lock of her hair around his fingers. ‘Red is passionate.’
She tugged it out of his grasp and smoothed it down with exaggerated care. ‘Red is for “Danger!! Mines!!”. Red is for blood.’
‘Why did you run out today?’
‘Why do you think, Alex?’
‘I was looking for you. I wanted to . . . help you.’
‘You wanted to help me? I’m not the one who stubs cigarettes out on their own skin, Alex.’
He didn’t say anything, but she heard the catch in his breath.
‘You didn’t need to be jealous of Luke, Alex. He used to beat me up. I suppose you didn’t find a hint of that in his boxes, did you?’
She glanced across, met his horrified gaze.
‘He broke my finger once because I’d taken my wedding ring off to have a bath and forgotten to put it back on again. Just bent it back until the joint dislocated. He was smiling while he did it.’ She bit her bottom lip. ‘I told the doctor at A & E that I had slipped in the bath, like some geriatric old lady.’
‘Jesus Christ.’
He reached for her hand; she shook him off. A fish must have broken the surface, because the reflected wash of light from the bars behind fractured for a moment.
‘I only went to hospital if I really needed to – when something was broken. I was too ashamed otherwise. Because everything he did to me was my fault, of course. I’d made him angry.’ Her voice broke. ‘He believed it, and in time I came to believe it too.’ She paused, swallowed. ‘I was so needy when I met Luke. So desperate for someone to love me, and to be able to love someone back with everything I had. And the funny thing is, I did love him so much early on.’ She dragged an arm roughly across her eyes. ‘So what about you, Alex? Why do you self-harm?’
A pause. Over the choppy sound of her own breathing, she heard him sigh. ‘I’m sorry, Tess, but that’s my business.’
‘I’ve just told you all . . . that, and it’s still your business.’ She shook her head. ‘No, Alex. Not if you want me to trust you. If you want me to trust you, I need to know why you do it. Why you’re here. You know about me, now I want to know about you.’
‘I said that it’s my business.’
She pulled her knees to her chest and wrapped her arms around them. ‘Guilt?’ she asked softly. She heard the pattern of his breathing change, quicken, and twisted to face him. ‘Are you punishing yourself for something?’
He shook his head, but his eyes were unreadable. He reached for her hand, took it in his, and she felt the stippled surface of his burns against her skin. She shivered. He raised her hand to his mouth and kissed the back of it. She felt the warmth of his lips, and shivered again. She glanced away at the lights of the city floating on the surface of the water, suggesting a shape, something she couldn’t quite name.
‘No, Alex.’ She wrenched her hand away. ‘It doesn’t work like that. You can’t do this. This . . .’ she gestured to his arm, ‘ . . . then just . . . make it all go away.’
His face was pale, his dark eyes guarded. She dropped her gaze to the butt of his Browning, reached for it, closing her fingers around the rubberised grip of the handle and yanking it out of his belt before he could react.
‘Why don’t you just put yourself out of your misery?’ she said quietly, feeling the weight of the gun in her hands.
‘Don’t play around with that, Tess. It’s loaded.’ He tried to take it from her, but she pulled it clear of him.
‘Loaded and cocked. Just put it to your head.’ She closed both hands around the butt and held it out in front of her, squinting down the sights towards the black of the river. ‘Put yourself out of your misery.’ Her voice was trembling, but her hand was steady.
He shook his head and made a noise, something quiet but bitter, bitten off before it was finished. Then he caught her wrist with one hand, pulled the Browning out of her grasp with the other. He jammed it back into his belt and pushed himself to his feet.
‘I’m going home.’ His face was hard; his voice controlled.
‘OK, Alex. Just run away.’
He turned silently and began picking his way up the bank. She twisted around on to her knees to watch him go.
‘Run away, Alex.’
He kept walking, refusing to turn.
She stood up and shouted, ‘You’re a sick boy, Alex.’
But by then he had disappeared into the darkness and she wasn’t sure if he had heard. She turned back to the river, slumped down and dropped her head to her hands.
39
Manchester, England
A South East Asian girl slid into the room wearing a baby-pink faux silk dressing gown. She smiled at him shyly and let the dressing gown fall from her shoulders. She wasn’t wearing much underneath: only a hot-pink G-string and a matching bra that sat flat against her chest. Wessex had bigger breasts than she did.
God, she couldn’t have been more than sixteen, seventeen tops. She hardly came up to his chest, and he was not even six foot. She was so thin that if he moved her in front of the window – not that there was one in this grotty attic – he would have been able to see the fluorescent orange from the street lamps cutting straight through her body.
There was something funny about the light in the room; it cast shadows across her face and body, but even so he could tell that she was beautiful. His eyes dipped to the tattoo on her thigh. He recognised it immediately.
The wooden boards creaked as she padded across the carpet to stand in front of him. She reached out and laid a soft hand on his cheek. Wessex found that he couldn’t look at her.
He felt her hand slip to his shirtfront, her fingers undo his top button. She was halfway down when he roused himself from his stupor.
‘No.’
He looked up. And saw. It wasn’t shadow that had criss-crossed her body. It was bruises. On her cheek, striping her arms, a huge one, fist-sized, right in the middle of her stomach.
‘No,’ he repeated. ‘I don’t want to.’
The fear he saw in her eyes was intense.
‘Please, I good. Very good. Make you very happy.’
She propped her hands on her hips as she spoke; tilted to one side and jiggled self-consciously. The wretched attempt to make herself more attractive transported him back to Christmas Day: watching his eleven-year-old niece trying to copy the moves from the Rihanna DVD he had bought her. Standing up, he buttoned up his shirt, bent and retrieved her gown, held it out to her. She pushed it away, her eyes filling with tears.
‘Please. I make you happy. I very good. Make you very happy.’
He shook his head.
‘It’s not because I don’t like you. You’re—’ His voice caught. ‘Beautiful. I’ll say we had sex, I promise. I just want to talk to you. Just talk.’ He slid the gown around her shoulders, his gaze fixing on that huge bruise on her stomach, bl
ue-black in the middle, yellowing around the edges.
‘Do they beat you up?’
She shook her head.
‘You can tell me.’ I’m police. He couldn’t say it. Couldn’t afford to give himself away, even to her.
She shook her head again, but with such resignation it made his chest tighten to watch her. Her voice, so quiet that he had to lean towards her to hear, sounded like it had been programmed in some kids’ toy.
‘Good men. They good men who keep me here.’
40
A shot. The noise that cut through the still air down by the river sounded like a shot, but then there was silence, and Tess had no idea if she had heard right. She glanced over her shoulder and back along the riverbank. It was dark, deserted. Her eyes found the bar behind her, an oasis of lights. The tables that she could see – the ones close to the front edge of the balcony – were still jammed with drinkers, the hum of noise as consistent as it had been all night. No one else seemed to have been disturbed by the sound. It could have been anything. The backfire of a moped engine. A celebration.
Turning back to the river, she folded her arms around her legs and rested her chin on her knees. She knew that she should go home, but she couldn’t quite face it. So she sat and stared into the darkness, and gradually something else broke through the hush in her mind. A disturbance in the rhythm of sounds from the bar: raised voices, an urgent shout, the scrabble of feet and the scrape of chair legs.
The scene that met her gaze when she glanced back had changed in the few moments since she’d last looked. The tables close to the front edge of the balcony had emptied; a stream of people bottlenecking towards the exit, pushing down the stairs. A jostling line of heads and shoulders filled the road that ran along the top of the riverbank – a crowd forming. She thought of the noise that sounded like a shot, then immediately of Alex. The feel of his Browning in her hand. Why don’t you just put yourself out of your misery?
Jesus, what had she done? She had sensed that he was close to the edge, but her fury at his refusal to open up to her in return had made her cruel. What the hell had she done?
Slithering and sliding on the muddy bank, she clawed her way to the road.
The Riverside Balcony Bar was empty now, its customers crowded by the roadside. Some were talking loudly, others whispering, others just standing there, watching, sickly-faced and silent. Grabbing the arm of a Westerner standing to the outside of the group, she pulled him around.
‘What’s happening?’
His face was pale. ‘Someone’s been shot.’
‘Who? Do you know who?’
He shook his head. She pushed her way to the front of the crowd. Another, smaller circle of people was huddled in the road fifty metres away. A moped cruised out of the darkness beyond them; it slowed, its driver interested. What he saw made him swerve and accelerate. The insect buzz of his engine shrieked as it sped past the crowd in front of the restaurant, fading, swallowed again by the night.
Tess ran along the road. She skipped sideways as a police vehicle screamed past her. It braked by the group, tyres spitting dirt. Four policemen in bottle-green uniforms and black combat boots, wielding wooden batons, spilled out of the doors and ploughed their way into the circle of people. Tess heard the sickening crunch of wood on bone, a couple of high-pitched, surprised cries of pain.
As she reached the circle’s edge, it began to part and separate. She caught glimpses of the police: shoving with their batons, baying orders, faces hard, arms outstretched. People began to peel reluctantly away from the group and drift back down the road, their attention still locked on what they had left.
*
In the photograph, Johnny was standing with two other guys; he couldn’t even remember their names now. The grey earth and shrubs of Angola spread out behind them, a flat, featureless landscape as far as the camera lens could see. He was smiling, his expression innocent and open. His two legs were tanned and muscled and he looked so damn young.
His first day of humanitarian mine clearing, fifteen years ago now.
Almost all of your adult life, Johnny.
Picking the photograph up, he held it close to his face and studied it, unable to take his eyes from the image of his own younger, perfect self. Turning it around, he slammed the glass frame against the edge of the bookshelf. The glass shattered; slivers rained on to the wooden floor. A jagged triangle of glass was still hanging in the frame. Closing his fingers around it, he pulled it out and used the end to slice through the photograph, top to bottom, left to right, corner to corner.
Dropping the frame on the floor, he ran his eyes along the other shelves, over the photographs, the souvenirs, a decade and a half of mine clearing. The first mine he had ever cleared lay on the middle shelf. A PMN anti-personnel blast mine, its brown plastic body and black pressure pad glossy as a priceless museum exhibit where Keav had polished it.
The PMN produces a substantial fragmentation hazard within a few metres.
Reaching out, he put his finger on the pressure pad, pressed it gently.
It was a game. It had started out as a game. He had just been playing with those women, playing with their lives.
The large explosive content, combined with the fragmentation, leads to very serious injury and can prove fatal.
His hand was trembling.
For fun. Just because it was fun, and their position in life, their choices, made them irrelevant to him.
Once armed this mine cannot be neutralised.
He tensed his arm, trying to steady his hand, spread his fingers and gripped the sides of the pressure pad. It wasn’t his fault. How the hell was he supposed to know it would go this far? That he was playing the game with a mad man?
Explosive type: TNT. Operating pressure: 8–25 kg.
He lifted the pressure pad, teeth clenched against the jitters in his body, and peered inside. It was empty.
He was still staring into the empty case of the mine when he heard Keav come into the room and cross the wooden floor towards him. He dropped it.
‘I told you to get rid of this mine-clearing stuff.’
‘I will get rid.’
‘I don’t want to think about this shit any more. I’m out of it. I want it gone from my life. All of it.’ He closed his hand around the glass shard.
She gasped. ‘Johnny . . .’
‘Now,’ he bellowed. ‘Get rid of it all now.’
He saw her hesitate, then turn for the door.
Blood was seeping through the gaps in his fingers. He opened his hand. The glass was embedded in his palm. He stared at it, detached, then he was suddenly aware of the quantity of blood. It had run down his arm and was all over the sleeve of his shirt. Huge globs had fallen to the wooden floor. Pinching the top edge of the shard between the fingers of his other hand, he tried to pull it out. The skin of his palm sucked on to the edge of the glass, lifting with it; he felt a nerve connection all the way up his arm. He tugged again and the glass pulled away, releasing a fresh gush of blood.
Keav came back into the room carrying a wooden box. She saw the blood and the box slammed to the floor. Ignoring her, Johnny turned and shuffled to the bathroom, leaning heavily on one crutch.
Pulling a towel from the rail below the sink, he pressed it to his hand. His palm felt numb, his fingers swollen. Curling his palm over the rim of the basin, he picked up one end of the towel and then the other, wrapped them over the back of his hand. It took him some time to make a knot: gripping the towel with his teeth, tightening, gripping, tightening.
His palm was throbbing now, fingers bloated and stiff. He held his hand up in front of his face, catching his reflection in the mirror beyond it. Alcohol-washed blue irises, marbled with red, stared back at him from a pale, haunted face, stubble beginning to soften and curl into a beard.
Hobbling back to the sitting room, he slumped down on the sofa.
‘Get me some more whisky.’
Keav had almost emptied the shelves. ‘I just fini
sh.’
‘Now.’
Dropping the box, she scurried out of the room. By the time she came back, he had staggered around the room again, checking the window locks, bolting the door to the balcony. He had found his Makarov and was loading rounds into the magazine, his left hand lying impotent on the sofa beside him. Wedging the pistol between his knees, he slipped in the magazine, cocked it, checked the safety, and jammed it in his waistband.
He could look after himself.
Glancing up, Johnny saw Keav gaping at him. He put his hand out for the whisky and she handed it to him at arm’s length. He lunged for her and she jumped back with a startled yelp.
He sat slowly back on the sofa, hands trembling.
*
Craning her neck, Tess tried to shove forward through the crowd. Suddenly she heard a sharp exchange in Khmer, one of the voices familiar. Jumping, she caught sight of Alex’s face. She stood on tiptoes and shouted over the heads of the people between them.
‘Alex.’
He saw her and raised a hand; he was talking to one of the policemen. The man was waving dismissively, his face devoid of emotion. Alex shook his head, clearly exasperated, and turned away. She watched him push his way through the crowd. When he reached her, he pulled her to him.
‘What the fuck is going on?’
‘You shouldn’t be here. Come on, we’re leaving.’
‘Alex, who is it?’
‘A Khmer man. I never saw him before.’
There was something in his face that frightened her, and she suddenly realised that he knew exactly who was lying on the tarmac.
‘Bullshit.’
She tried to tear herself from his grasp, but he held her tighter. She felt the tension in him.
The crowd had thinned, dispersed by the police; people were flowing past, back towards the restaurant. One of them bumped into Alex hard and he staggered. She took her chance, twisted herself out of his grasp and slipped past him.