by Ese McGowan
Only the Crows Know
By Ese McGowan
First Edition, June 2020
© 2020 E McGowan. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher and author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.
Cover design © 2020 E McGowan. All rights reserved.
Other novels by this author:
Dead Girls Don’t Cry
Don’t Trust Your Wife
Control
The Crooked Railway
Hot Pause, Women on the Edge
Fast and Farce
I Am King
Olive
1
Sometimes you’ve just got to write it out. That’s what they say isn’t it? Not that anyone will believe me. No one actually knows me, not the person I really am.
Communities have come together, clapped and cheered, learnt names and faces after years of living alongside one another. Walls have been broken down. Not in this street. My street. This is New Stasi Street. One wall was broken down but not for those reasons.
Everyone’s watching everyone from their plastic brains, their plastic houses, their plastic gardens. These are the types on my street. Waiting for the moment to strike.
I waited.
And I’ll wait again.
We live in a terrace, some town by the sea, me and him, and all around us is the virus, imperceptibly ghostly, a killer one for some, a virus that is callous and feels distinctly psychotic. It’s 2020. When you say it, even the year sounds a little maddening now. It’s May now, I’m me again, I wasn’t then, with him. In March. Beware the Ides of March. You should be.
I’ll take you back. It’s March when all around us are people doing the things they should be, and a whole lot of them doing things they shouldn’t because right now, it’s a pretty lawless society. Phones ring out, workers are furloughed, some people worry about money, some are stressed and others are relishing it, the whole damn thing. There’s a stench of anarchy and it isn’t brewing, it’s out there and it’s more dangerous than the virus. It’s covert street law and it’s ruthless and intimidating. It’s designed to be.
You get coughed in the face and there’s nothing any authority will do about it. No one can help you. No one wants to. They’re all too scared.
This is suburbia. This is the place where all rules have been extinguished. Where breathing over someone has become a threat, a fear, a power. Where the sociopaths reign supreme and where the police fritter away and lose rationality with a feral whip of power. It isn’t pleasant being a member of the “vulnerable”. This group the rudderless government have stigmatised and in so doing simultaneously weaponised the unruly, where the bullies enforce their own street laws uncontested. It leaves you with a metallic taste and a permanence of nausea. A headache that pulsates throughout each day, as the watchman patrols the terraced boundary, pushing you back inside your house, where he says you belong, as the walls are built higher and the marijuana in the plastic fortress at the bottom of his garden pumps out that stagnant stench.
This is not the great British spirit pulling together. Not on this street. That doesn’t exist. That’s a myth. It’s another excuse to do nothing. To run a country from under your desk, hiding, hoping that no one will notice. Where power seeps up the throat and spills out of the mouth, confident that you’ll get away with it all. Chances are you will. But if you write it down, chances are you won’t. Chances are, when the virus is peeled off the scab of your new reality, you won’t be able to hide what you have done and I’ll be there, breathing in the clean air of justice and slowly releasing my breath in the garden you disavowed of me, when I hear the handcuffs chink your life shut and the silence of your fading pleas vanish as the police car door shuts and takes you away. The headache will go, the sickness will fade and the neighbours – a word I have come to find so disturbing I grimace at the mere mention of it – will wilt their necks and pretend that they never liked you in the first place. It’s human nature. Not a good nature. It’s what happens.
It didn’t start here but what happened before is too much to tell you right now. That will come later if I can bear to say it all. I’ve remembered it all now, what happened before I blocked it out but I’m telling you about March, when it all began.
There is someone who is making life difficult for me. There is history with him, the same hell when he patrolled me before. I’ve had to say it so many times since, explain myself and justify myself that the apprehension of saying it even one more time is exhausting. It will take a while. I’ll get to it eventually. It can take a lifetime to be believed sometimes and maybe all the time when you move to a community as an outsider. This town isn’t an island but maybe it wants to be. The drawbridges were up but people still crossed them and the natives had a big loud issue with that. Then the virus poisoned the air and they clawed back their xenophobic power. I have never understood hatred from people who are strangers to you.
That all became acutely clear after the party, the last one. And you betrayed me because you wanted them to like you. You wanted him to like you. You were one of them, in the end or maybe I missed your beginning.
*
They were all next door, a neighbourhood crush. It used to be a quiet place there. That’s one big joke now. No one ever talked to each before this. But that’s a good thing isn’t it, being close enough to breath over each other? It’s a deaf world now. I went to one of them, those parties I mean, he made me go, and you’ll see why I did when I tell you what happened but I’m one of the shielded, or so they call it, and he had me locked up, most of the time. Only I’m not in this group, the shielded, the isolated; it’s what he has told everybody. He told them some story and they’ll retell it to you, I have no doubt about that, all convinced of the veracity of it, until they’re not, until they think it was him. Or me.
They have no understanding of what it’s like to feel marooned in your house, severed from a social life, removed from the human race, treated like you’re a crazy person, exorcised from the Thursday night clapping for carers, because of course, this isolation shit is hardly conducive to causing madness, is it? You people are way behind me, I thought, before the countrywide lockdown kicked in. What did I know? What did anyone know? What did you know? You were told not to go out, at all, only last night. The full padlock. And look what you’ve already done? They’d already had a party the week before, or was it days? So don’t ask me why they needed another, especially when I’ve seen them all, with him, in the street, leaning against each other and sipping from a shared wine glass. Stupid, defiant, rigid? What is it? You know, when you can’t even go out for a walk, you find yourself gazing out of the window more than ever before, longing for the outdoors, longing to place your feet at a long gait so impossible within the confines of your house. You gaze at people, wondering what they are saying to each other, wondering why when one speaks the other shakes their head in astonished disapproval. What are they talking about? Who? You see the grotesque behaviour of the people who live alongside you, who you have never talked to, nor they you and neither will ever want to. Especially not now. This mixing of households, callously spreading disease because they appear to have some uneducated belief of invincibility. Or was it an epiphany that I missed? This lot, all your so-called friends. Your new friends.
They have blood on their hands, I thought, watching them all and now the police are here and there is a dead body in the garden next door and it has nothing to do with me.
2
; He’s not even in the house with me. He’s still over there, next door with her. And she’s nuts. You want to know what crazy looks like? Go around there, spend a minute with her. Have you ever had that feeling that the whole world is going to come crashing down on you? No? Well you’re in luck, it’s about to happen, you’re about to witness it. I’m banking on it.
My partner, the guy straining his head out of the back door catching sight of the body there, don’t be fooled by him. He’s a charmer, so I’m told. I can’t see him that way anymore. It doesn’t fit. It’s an act. Has to be with him, always is. It’s how I ended up here, duped, fooled, manipulated, weakened, my voice softened to a bleat. No one hears me anymore. The lies you tell, I want to shout out at him, the ones you store in your mental library, the people you collect in your obsession of masking who you are while you construct and maintain this false representation of me. It has to stop. You have to stop. And now Coronavirus, almost empowering you. Look at you. I have so little fight in me to cope with you and what you have done to me and I don’t know if I can handle this lockdown with you in this some kind of hell you have created for me. I’m glad you’re there with her. I’ve had enough of you.
You have portrayed me to be a person I don’t recognise and everyone believes you. Everyone adores you. Everyone is sucked in by you. They’re not stupid people, not all of them. Why do they fall for your every word? What manipulation you have crafted, refined. When does it end? How does it end? I’m too scared to even wish you would catch the virus and it would strangle your breath. I’m too scared to think these thoughts about you. But I do. Don’t you see what you have done to me? You have forged my own moral bankruptcy. You have imprisoned me here by financially trapping and burdening me so I can never leave you. You have destroyed who I was and manufactured a myth of me. People used to like me. I used to laugh. I enjoyed life before you. You have convinced them all that I have trapped you. That I threaten suicide whenever you try to walk away from me. It isn’t true. Even my own mother has changed. I see the way she looks at me, like I’m a stranger to her. You reminded her of things she had buried. I don’t even know what you could have told her. I cannot bring myself to imagine the words you have constructed for her that may never be revealed to me. You have injected doubt into my mother’s heart, her eyes, her love for me. What is left of me for you to destroy? Will you let me go? Will you ever let me go? I cannot be forced to pretend that I’m happy any longer. You tell everyone I’m crazy and in this lockdown, I still have no voice. No one can see that they should worry for me, instead of you. You don’t even care that the lockdown loopholes you exploit throw blood on your hands and no one notices. They all accept that you never do anything wrong. Wonderful Adam. Such a great guy. Poor Adam. He deserves to be happy. When will you all wake up? Each and every one of you. When will people see through your thin veneer? You’re a sociopath. You don’t care about anything. And now, this woman, Alicia Mason, as evil as you, someone’s dead and you and her are spinning it to make it look like I was the killer, I just know it. Will anyone ever believe me? Will anyone ever see the truth of you?
He has twisted his neck and is looking up at the window directly at me. The shocked expression feigned for the corpse, the act in front of the police, has morphed into a cold stare at me. Yeah, I know what you’re planning but I’ve got news for you. This time, is my time. This time I will win.
3
Detective Miriam Sykes. Well how about that? And she looks exactly the same, more or less. Svelte, inquisitive eyes, and they’re a milky blue, very pale, hard to look away from. Her figure is literally awesome. She must work out. No one could look that toned without doing so. She probably runs triathlons, she’s that kind of person, competitive, hungry for life, vivacious. Now there’s history here with this woman, obviously, with me and her. I’m not sure I’m happy to see her or not. I’m watching her right now. I remember her but she won’t recognise me, not yet. It’s doubtful, although if she does she might not let on. I guess it will depend on what he’s told her about me. But I don’t look anything like I used to.
Miriam is looking at the sight afore her feet. She knew it would be like this, you can tell. You hoped to be wrong, didn’t you, Miriam? You hoped people were mostly good. Do you remember that? Have you forgotten the way you saw the world then? When we were kids and my hair was brown not this brassy red colour he has dyed me in. This isn’t even my real name. Don’t you see me? Don’t you remember who I am? Do you see the world the way you used to? But no, in your eyes it was always there, the realism, the cynicism of how low people could topple down to, their morals trickling into a dried-out gutter.
She looks unsteady standing there, looking down at the cadaver. It’s a whole new unknown, this virus, and she doesn’t know she won’t catch it from the corpse. She wavers, treading gently, stooping over and holding her breath. And she’s thinking it’s a risk she doesn’t want to take without better protective gear on. She’s not going to prod the body. She’s not going in for a closer look. I don’t know if she can see me watching her, I sense that she can but that dead body has nothing to do with me. She’s wearing mirrored aviators, it’s hard to see where she is looking and she’s smart, not one movement of her body would give her away that she sees me right there, pretty clear. I’m not sure, I’m not unsure.
Why is it that wherever she finds a body lying limp on a cold ground, the crows swirl and circle above her? I wonder if that’s what she’s thinking as she looks up to the sky at them. They are not vultures picking at the fading temperature of the corpse’s flesh, they are merely hovering, signalling something and with the sound of the caw-caw and the swooping wings catching the air current. Spring is sure in the air. The blossom will be out soon. This temperature, for March is too warm for a crisis in this country. The English tend to go a little gaga with the slightest hint of warmth on their skin. They fall deaf, a lot of them do. That can’t have helped what happened here, in this house. It doesn’t help me. Look around you Miriam. See what isn’t there. I’m not there. I wasn’t there, and this is not the way this looks. It’s not the way he’ll tell it.
This person has clearly fallen from the roof. She’s looking up at the house and it’s lit up by the streaks of sunlight, like shards of glass flicking light-spots on the windows and bouncing away like a firework. It smarts the eyes. She covers her brow with her hand to shield the glare. It’s high up there. She’ll need to take a look around. She turns. All about her, all across the garden are cans of spent lager, bottles of discarded spirits, vodka mostly. She looks confused. Whatever happened here, Miriam, it isn’t as simple as it looks. It was a party full of selfish stupid people but this wasn’t an accident.
The wife is inside. I’m out in the garden, looking in at them from behind the shed. It’s an open plan thing in there – hate that. Makes all the furniture look decidedly awkward. This is Alicia Mason, shuddering on the couch, the wife of the corpse and she’s good at it, acting. I’ll bet she’s never shown a true emotion in her life. Maybe she isn’t even capable. She’s crying yet this is a sound that is more familiar with theatre. It’s hammy. Something about her feels out of kilter. You can tell that Miriam is not taken in by her. Her body hasn’t curled into a position of empathy. For how long she can resist the thin veneer of her hidden character is anyone’s guess. No one else has looked straight through this woman at her rotten core. Miriam is waiting for the tent to arrive to cover the body and keep the prying eyes out. And the crime scene investigators, they’ll examine it all, see where he fell from, register the debris around and under him and then she’ll talk to the wife and of course, she’ll need to know who was here last night. That won’t be easy, unless the neighbours are keen on snitching and one thing’s for sure, nobody will implicate Adam. His God complex reigns supreme. All the women around here are in love with him. Maybe I’m wrong but it sure looks that way. No one, who came to this party, Miriam, is likely to be up front about being here after the Government laid the law down la
st night. Because it doesn’t look good for them, does it? That dead body whose last breath was pressurised on a ventilator, lying motionless on the hospital intensive care bed could have been caused by any one of them. Digesting that fact won’t be easy. It’s better to pretend that nothing they do flicks its effect upon anyone else. It’s better to pretend there are no consequences. It’s better to deflect the attention on an easy target.
Miriam wonders if she should be wearing a mask? Could this be a potential Covid-19 spreading party by selfish, ignorant people? It’s an uneasy new normal and you have to check yourself. You can see her thinking it as she steps back suddenly from the body, remembering apprehensively what situation we are now all in. This peculiar reality of an invisible killer and you don’t know where it is, where it lies, how it moves. Could the Spring breeze be agitating viral particles into the air from this cadaver?
Her team are about to start door-knocking. She goes to the front to organise them and I creep alongside the wall to eavesdrop. I have to know the situation before it finds me because I won’t lose this one. No way.
‘Start with the woman, at number 45, Doris Lettinger. She called the police about the party. See if she heard anyone talking about the dead guy on the lawn before they ran back home.’
Bloody Doris Lettinger, I see. It’s as good place to start as any. Well, well. What can I tell you about her? I thought she was all right when I first met her. I make big mistakes though. That’s how I got here in the first place. Doris, ok, sweet little old lady who had lost her husband some years before and never recovered from it. That’s the story here. She still sets his place at the table each night and no one is ever allowed to sit in his armchair which lies draped with his green, bobbled old cardigan that he had worn since the holiday they took in Guernsey, 1978. It’s true, I’ve seen it for myself. She’s deeply territorial about it.