by Neil Cross
Chris McNeil shuffled her feet.
‘Can I come in, then?’
Charlie stepped aside, and she entered the hallway, delicate as a cat in her dove-grey coat and cranberry scarf. He said, ‘Come through to the kitchen.’
He didn’t want her in the living room.
She nodded and followed, unwrapping the scarf as she went.
Patrick was moved by the comet. He understood its loneliness.
Very softly, he said, ‘It’s amazing,’ and when he moved back from the eyepiece, he blinked.
Jo was almost sitting on his knee, she was leaning in so close.
‘You see?’
He kissed her. ‘Yes. Now your turn.’
They swapped places. It was like manoeuvring inside a submarine. Jo put her eye to the telescope and Patrick joined Nately in the garden.
Nately said, ‘Why don’t you stay?’
‘I’d love to. But I can’t, mate.’ Patrick turned to face him. ‘Are you okay, John?’
Nately was going to say yes—he was so close to it that Patrick actually saw it pass across his face, like an after-image. But the after-image faded.
‘John?’
Nately shook his head. ‘Stay. Just for an hour.’
From the shed, Jo called out, ‘It’s fantastic!’
‘You stay there,’ Nately called to her. ‘Take notes.’
Patrick shuffled, awkward. Then he checked his watch. ‘I’d best be off.’
Nately scratched the nape of his neck. And then he did something he’d never done: he offered Patrick his hand.
‘Goodbye, then.’
Patrick shook the hand.
He looked up at the sky.
He left.
Chris said, ‘I can’t believe I’m here.’
She still had on her coat. It was cold; the Aga wasn’t lit because they never used it.
‘Charlie, I know I said it before. But I really am sorry.’
Behind her, the air boiled with sprites and demons that belonged to the Anchorage Hotel. She was a herald, an emissary. She’d been sent to take him back.
‘Don’t worry about it.’
‘Can’t we have one adult conversation? Just one.’
‘Whatever.’ He thought of her, on her knees, gulping at his cock: then sitting drunk on the edge of his desk with his semen glinting like pearls in her hair.
‘Okay.’ She found her cigarettes and passed the pack from hand to hand. And then she said, ‘I’m pregnant.’
He jerked his head—shocked and birdlike—to look at her.
She lurched away, as if to avoid a head-butt.
‘Sorry?’
She popped a cigarette into her mouth and lit it. ‘I’m keeping it. And whatever.’
The world was making a noise like a vacuum cleaner. Thinking was difficult. His body beat with the rhythm of his heart.
Eventually, he said: ‘You’re having a baby?’
‘People do.’
He laughed out loud, because she was stronger than him. It was a terrible feeling. Oppressive, incarcerating.
‘Do you want it?’
She hugged herself. ‘Actually.’
She reached over the table, to touch the back of his hand. He withdrew: her touch would suck the life from him.
She said, ‘This isn’t your problem.’
They each had their back to the cold, stone walls of the kitchen; outside, England wheeled all around them. The fields, the sky, the sea, the yellow bubbles of the cities.
He stood. ‘I need a drink.’
She crossed her legs. Tapped a nervous foot.
‘I don’t want anything from you,’ she said. ‘Or anything like that. But I thought—you know.’
He went to the kitchen drawers.
She had her back to him. There was a knot of cells inside her, dividing. He thought of the walls in the Anchorage Hotel bar; throbbing, womb red.
He opened the tool drawer and took out the claw hammer. He took a step. Then he hit Chris in the head with the hammer. Its claw pierced her skull and entered her brain. The impact nearly broke his wrist.
Chris McNeil fell over. The chair landed on its side next to her. She made a strange noise, baby noises.
Her hands and feet were moving in circles, like someone making a snow angel. The hammer jutted from her skull like a handle. She was trying to grab it, but she couldn’t control her hands. Her eyes were white.
Charlie ran the tap and splashed his face with cold water.
Chris was moaning and trying to kick herself along the floor, towards the door.
And then the thing inside Charlie curled up and shrank down, leaving him an empty shell.
Charlie vomited. Everything came up with it. But when it had, Chris McNeil was dead anyway. And, although the little thing inside her lived for a little while longer, soon it, too, was dead.
Chris was lying on the floor with her arms more or less at her sides, and one of her legs askew, as if she was dancing the Charleston.
Charlie hadn’t moved, except to drape a dirty dishcloth over her face. He was still sitting in the kitchen chair when Patrick walked in.
Patrick stood there for a very, very long time.
Inside Nately’s house, the phone began to ring. Out in the garden, Nately turned towards it and Jo followed his gaze.
‘Who’s that?’ she asked.
‘Wrong number.’ But Nately stared at the dark house, as inside, the phone rang and rang and rang.
Eventually, he said, ‘Wait here.’
‘Okey-dokey.’
As Mr Nately scuttled away—why so fast?—Jo became aware of his absence. But, although she felt weak and frightened, looking up at the cold indifferent sky, she kept her eye to the viewer, following the comet’s progress; the tumbling mountain of ice, its skirts of vapour trailing in space behind it.
Nately didn’t turn on the lights. He didn’t need to. He went to the phone.
‘Hello?’
‘John?’
Something had gone from Patrick’s voice. Nately shivered and turned on the spot, wrapping the telephone cord around himself, the better to look into the shadows.
‘Patrick. Are you all right?’
‘Yeah. John, listen. Could Jo stay at your place tonight?’
Nately consulted his watch. It was still 1 April.
‘Of course.’
There was a noise on the line, and for a moment Nately wondered if Patrick was weeping. He thrilled with terror. And on its heels, there was a kind of relief.
‘She can stay as long as she likes. She’s welcome.’
‘Great,’ said Patrick. ‘See you in the morning.’
After Patrick had vomited, then wept, then threatened to kill his own child, then wept again, he got himself together.
He opened a bottle of whisky. Then he sliced a lemon in half, tilted his head back and squeezed the juice of each half down his nostrils.
He snorted, choked, coughed, cried out.
Then he drank off a quarter pint of whisky, wiping at tears with his forearm. When that was done, there was a moment of violent disorientation. But then his head cleared.
He looked at his child. Hating him.
Then he went outside and looked at Chris McNeil’s car. He had the bottle of whisky in his fist.
Charlie followed him.
‘Have you touched this car?’
‘No.’
It looked very solid in the moonlight, like an ingot.
Patrick turned and stalked inside.
In the kitchen, he stared at the corpse and began to cry again. ‘Who is she?’
He’d already asked it a hundred times, and had not once waited for an answer.
He wiped his snotty nose on the back of his hand and
then took a swig of whisky. Then he knelt and opened the bottom drawer. It was the carrier-bag drawer. He took out a carrier bag. Tesco.
Charlie hung over him. Patrick looked up and snarled. For a moment, crouched there, he resembled a wolf.
‘What did you touch?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Her handbag? What?’
‘Nothing.’
Patrick swallowed a mouthful of sour whisky vomit. He looked briefly at the floor.
‘Go and get some gloves. And some boots. And a coat.’
Charlie went upstairs to get his boots and his parka. He put them on. He found his gloves. He put them on, too. Then he went downstairs.
In the kitchen, Patrick had worried and strained at the hammer until he was able to remove it from Chris McNeil’s head. Then he set it to one side, on a carrier bag. He was kneeling. He had lifted Chris McNeil’s head into his lap and slipped a carrier bag over it. Now he was Sellotaping the carrier bag; wrapping the tape round and round the dead woman’s throat.
He was muttering under his breath. Charlie tilted his head; a question.
‘It’s for the blood,’ said Patrick. ‘You little prick. It’s for the blood.’
Chris McNeil was heavy. It was like carrying a sofa, or a mattress, and it took them a long time just to get her to the stile, and a great deal of heaving to get her over it. By then, it had gone midnight: it was 2 April.
They lugged her through the oak forest, and onto the clifftop; the place where, in the summer, Patrick sometimes liked to come and read a book. Here, they laid her down.
Their backs and arms and legs hurt. It was hard to breathe. They were muddy and scratched.
The night sky was still very clear. Patrick could feel the comet, although he did not look at it. He knelt and removed the carrier bag from Chris McNeil’s head. He had been careful, so that none of the tape’s adhesive had stuck to her throat. He scrunched up the bag and put it in his pocket.
There was a hole in her skull; the shape of a hammer-claw. The shape went into her brain; the police might take a cast from it. So, on his knees, Patrick felt around for a rock, something that would fit the palm of his hand.
In the darkness, on his knees, it took a while. When he had the rock, he knelt beside Chris McNeil.
He said, ‘Oh God,’ and brought down the rock on Chris McNeil’s head. He felt it break, like an egg. But not enough. So he did it again, and again, until he was sure.
When he was finished, he turned his face away and stood. Stooped. Grabbed her wrists. They were slender.
Charlie grabbed her ankles.
Patrick counted quietly to three. Then, keeping their backs straight, they hoisted her. And then they swung her—one, two, three!—like a hammock, and tossed her over the edge of the cliff.
Chris McNeil was broken up by the rocks below. And soon the tide would send out fingers to dislodge her from the rocks, take her with it, wherever it was going.
They heard nothing. Just the sound of their own breathing.
Charlie sat and hugged his knees.
Patrick stooped to pick up the rock. It was speckled with wet matter. He was glad he was drunk.
He reached back his arm, as far as it would go, and he launched the rock into the sea.
They walked back. The night spoke softly.
Outside the house, Patrick ordered Charlie to strip naked. When Charlie protested, Patrick struck him, open-handed across the face. Charlie fell to his knees.
Patrick wanted to hit him again; but if he started, he wouldn’t stop. He waited with fists clenched at his sides, until Charlie stood like a stamen in a bloom of a muddy clothing. He was naked in the moonlight, hairless and tuber-pale, this murderer, and Patrick turned the hose on him.
Charlie screamed, because the water was shockingly cold. Patrick grabbed his neck and forced him to his knees and passed the cold surge of water through his hair.
Then Patrick stripped and turned the hose on himself.
And dripping, he went into the house and got two bin bags and took them outside, and into the bags he stuffed their muddy clothes.
Patrick stood, naked, shivering, in the kitchen. He dripped on the flagstone floor, big fat splats. Wet footprints. His hair curled, wet, at his nape.
He picked up the whisky and drank the rest of it. He waited until the fire passed through him.
He put the bloody hammer into the sink. He ran the tap, so the hammer was covered with half an inch of water. Into the water, he emptied half a container of Drano—it was in a cupboard under the sink, among a jumble of other unused cleaning products. The water began to foam and boil. It would destroy the blood and dissolve the hair.
He went upstairs, to get dressed. He passed Charlie’s door. Charlie was sitting on the edge of his bed.
Patrick stood in the doorway.
Charlie didn’t move. Patrick expected his eyes to glow yellow in the lamplight. But instead, they had the pleading mildness of a kitsch Christ, rendered in Catholic tat.
Before sunrise, Patrick set out in the Golf. He ordered Charlie to follow fifteen minutes behind him, in the VW.
He drove all the way to Bristol; to a council estate called Knowle West. He remembered it from his time on the Evening Post. It was notorious. He left the Golf parked by the kerb.
He headed down the street, aware of the pit bulls and German shepherds growling behind flimsy gates. He reached the main road and waited outside a corner shop until a bus came to take him into town.
He met Charlie outside a Mall called the Galleries. Charlie had dumped the binliners in the wheelie-bins behind a McDonald’s—and in another bin were Chris McNeil’s handbag and credit cards, carefully shredded.
Patrick let Charlie take the wheel on the way back to Devon. It wasn’t a long trip, fifty or sixty miles south-west, but Patrick soon lost his sense of position.
He unwound the window and smelled the sea. It did not make him happy. That man was gone.
That man had been a sidekick. This man was an accomplice.
They parked in the sunlight outside their house. They got out of the car. They stared at the house. It had not changed.
Patrick said, ‘You killed Rue.’
Charlie swivelled his head. And at last, Patrick saw the creature that lived behind Charlie’s eyes: the hyena.
‘And the letters. Those terrible letters to your mum. The photographs. That was you, too?’
Charlie stared at the house.
‘Why?’
‘I wanted to stop her.’
‘Stop her what?’
‘Sleeping with Richard.’
Patrick roared and raised his fist. He grabbed his son by his tender throat and squeezed. He backed his son into the door and roared into his face. Charlie cringed and trembled.
And when the roar didn’t empty Patrick, he let the boy go and watched him sink to his knees. Then he punched the door, and punched it again, and punched it again until the panel splintered and the skin of his knuckles ripped and the bones bruised inside him and the urge to kill had gone.
Patrick sucked at his bleeding fist while Charlie knelt in the shadow of the house, coughing green bile upon the stone threshold.
We were adapted to live in the shadow of predators. It was fear of the beast that made us human. Beasts were simply the product of forest and grasslands—the urge to kill, to live, to create life. Beasts were part of natural history.
So were monsters.
Patrick bound his swollen fist in an athletic bandage and they drove to Minehead and had their heads shaved; Patrick was concerned that brain matter and blood had dried in there. He sat in a nylon cape and watched curls drop into his lap; he looked at an unfamiliar face: haggard, older than he expected, with raw, red ears.
Charlie’s hair was like suede; his skull was a fine shape. His eyes were big an
d harmless. He looked like a wigless prince.
Shaved, Patrick wandered the infinite double loop of Monkeyland. His ears and his scalp were chilled by the wind. He stood and watched the capuchins.
They stopped capering. For an extended moment, they raised up on their hind legs and stared at him. He dropped his eyes in shame; moved on.
Patrick drove to Nately’s house, still drunk, with Jo’s things in bags and boxes: her books, her clothes, her posters, her only CD, Nevermind.
He wanted her never again to set foot in the house Charlie had contaminated. It was filled with black radiation. It would ruin her. It would blacken her teeth and poison her hair; it would riddle her with tumours.
Nately’s garden was just entering into bud, and Nately and Jo stood together in the doorway. They saw Patrick—thinner, shaved, deep vertical scores in his cheeks, holding a box of Jo’s stuff in his arms.
Nately took the box from Patrick, took it and stepped inside. He said nothing.
He left Jo on the doorstep.
‘Dad?’
And their last moment was gone; it had been a long time ago. He thought of their morning runs; of her determined slog, her comically flailing limbs. And he loved her, terribly and acutely, as something lost to him.
He kissed her forehead. He ran his hands though her dry tangled hair, as he once had, when she was a toddler and he was soothing her tears.
‘I love you, baby girl.’
‘Me, too. And it’s not for ever, is it? It’s not like it’s going to be for ever.’
He crushed her to him. She was so fragile; her long thin bones.
‘Nothing is. Nothing’s for ever.’
But he was lying, and in the terrible nights that followed—alone with Charlie, full of whisky and hatred and ghosts—Patrick thought often of the night of the perihelion, in Nately’s garden: how Nately had asked him not to go. And how he’d tapped his watch and said no.
And he hated Nately, for if there had been no comet, the woman might still be alive. And when he remembered his daughter, safe and uncorrupted in the haven of Nately’s cottage, and Nately’s goodness, he clenched his helpless fists and ground his helpless teeth for the creature he’d become.
When the morning came for Charlie to leave, Patrick grabbed his son’s shirt in his fist—so violently that Charlie nearly lost his footing—and stuffed into his pocket a wad of cash. Charlie didn’t need the money; he’d saved so much, pulling all those double shifts at the Anchorage Hotel.