Meaner Things

by David Anderson

  *

  “There’s something else we have to talk about, Mike.”

  “Yes there is, isn’t there.” It wasn’t a question. There was something hanging over us, we both knew what it was, and we’d both been putting off discussing it. But now that the way was cleared for Emma and I, there was no more avoiding it.

  “Let’s take a walk in that odd-looking sculpture park.”

  I’d already paid the bill – in cash of course – and we rose and left the restaurant. It was only a short stroll to the ‘Parco delle Sculture’ which, according to the brochure, was ‘a genuine open-air museum’ with ‘thirteen contemporary art sculptures’ promising ‘an intriguing dialogue with nature’. More importantly to us, it was an extensive area of parkland where we could talk in private.

  Now that it was finally time to speak of the past, I didn’t know how to begin. We strolled past a massive concrete fist-in-the-air and a naked, stern-looking stone woman with large breasts and an unfortunate splattering of bird poop, which I thought would have been perfect for Charlie’s front yard. Still neither Emma nor I spoke. When we arrived at a pair of tall objects that looked like giant alien feet, Emma finally broke the silence.

  “You came to Victoria afterwards, didn’t you? You called me one day?”

  “Yes,” I replied. “But I couldn’t say anything.”

  She turned and touched my arm. “Of course you couldn’t,” she said. “Neither could I.”

  “I had to find you.”

  “To get revenge?”

  “To get an explanation.”

  We walked a few more steps without speaking.

  “How much did you find out?” she said.

  “As much as I needed.”

  She frowned. ‘Sit here and tell me.”

  We sat on the soft grass and I explained to her how I’d found out about the motor accident and her change of identity. As I talked she sat quietly and looked at the ground, giving the occasional small nod as I narrated.

  “Nice work, Sherlock,” she said, smiling faintly. I could sense she was embarrassed by this part of her past.

  “That’s how I know your real name,” I said. I was still reluctant to ask the obvious question.

  “I never liked it much,” she said, “Agneta wasn’t a cool name in high school. Too much like ‘Agnes’. I’ve been Emma for so long now it’s how I think of myself.”

  “You don’t have to explain,” I lied.

  She looked up and stared at me. “Of course I have to explain. Isn’t that what this is all about?” As quickly as her frustration had flared it was gone again. “Sorry, Mike. You’re entitled to an explanation and I want to give you one. It’s just hard, that’s all.”

  “Take your time,” I said. But I needed her to tell me. I always had.

  She swallowed. “It’s so long ago,” she began, “And it’s a time in my life I’ve tried to forget about. I’m ashamed of it really.”

  She told me her story. During her last couple of years at high school she’d mixed with the wrong crowd and specifically with the wrong boyfriend, a high school dropout called Ricky. He sold the older students dope outside the school gates. They hadn’t been together long before he’d introduced her to harder drugs, and her life had spiralled downhill from there.

  “I’d always been naturally bright and a good student,” she said, “But now I began skipping classes and getting failing grades. Teachers were on my back and my dad was worried sick. One day I realised I had to do something quick or I could kiss university goodbye.”

  That’s when the real trouble began.

  “Thing is,” Emma continued, “Ricky had moved up the dealing ladder by then. By now he was driving a BMW and dealing more in hard drugs.” She gave me a sheepish look. “To be honest, I’d actually started dealing a bit myself by then. Just weed, not the really bad stuff. But I wanted out.”

  “Let me guess: he reacted badly.”

  “Ricky was mad when I told him. It was then that I realised he only wanted me as his sexy salesgirl. I tried to break up with him but that made things even worse.”

  “What did he do?” I said, though I could already guess the answer.

  The evening was warm and mild, but she folded her arms across her chest and shivered as if suddenly cold. “He beat me up; said there was no way out, short of a coffin. It scared me real bad.”

  “You must have been in pretty deep.”

  “Guess I was. I was so young, just a teenager. A very naïve one, I suppose.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “I got off the weed and my grades soared. But Ricky kept pushing, kept trying to get me to shoot up with him. When I refused he lost it completely, used his fists again. Said I was no use to him anymore, a liability, a useless bitch who should be put down. One time he choked me so hard I blacked out.”

  “Why didn’t you run?”

  “Where to exactly?”

  I shrugged. She had a point. “But you didn’t give in?”

  “No, but I was terrified of him. I couldn’t leave school with finals coming up, but I planned on leaving Oak Bay straight afterwards. I begged him to keep away whilst I sat the exams, and he did. But the day after my last one, he called and demanded I come over. I refused. Then I made a big mistake: I stupidly told him I was leaving. He said if I ran away he’d hunt me down and find me wherever I went. Said I was a dead girl walking or something crazy like that.”

  “Then came the day of the accident?”

  “It was no accident. He’d called that morning and I was so sick of it I told him to go to hell. He must have shot up afterwards and gone crazy. Anyway, Emma and I were walking home together that afternoon. She was one of my few remaining school friends. A good person; she kept her life pretty simple, unlike me. She didn’t deserve what happened . . .”

  Her voice broke up and I could see that tears were close. “Go on,” I said gently.

  “It was lightly raining. I had a waterproof top on so I lent Emma my yellow jacket. We were both tall blondes. She was a bit heavier than me, but with the jacket over her we must have looked alike from the back. I remember hearing a car coming up behind, but neither of us looked around. We were on the sidewalk, after all. That’s safe, right? The car seemed to be closing on us very fast. I finally turned and looked, but by then it had accelerated so fast that it was right up on the kerb right behind us.”

  She paused for a moment and swallowed hard before continuing.

  “It was Ricky, in some big ugly Jeep he’d probably hot-wired earlier. He must have thought that Emma was me and drove right into her, on purpose. There was an awful thump, Emma went down, and I heard the wheels go over her. It all happened so quickly; in a few seconds he was around the corner and gone. Emma actually got up, but fell again straight away. That’s when she died, they said. They took her to hospital but couldn’t revive her. I didn’t get a scratch.”

  “You didn’t tell the police who it was?”

  “I wanted to, so much, but when the cops arrived I just couldn’t. Ricky could have produced plenty of evidence I’d been dealing too, and it would have been my word against his. He’d have been out on bail within hours and he’d have come straight for me.”

  I nodded.

  “I was eighteen and terrified, Mike, just terrified.”

  “I understand.” And I could imagine how she had felt when Jonathan Zheng came along and proved to be a nothing but a richer, cultured version of Ricky.

  “I was sitting in the waiting room at Emergency, holding Emma’s bag in my lap when I got the idea. Ricky would find out he’d killed the wrong girl, but that wouldn’t stop him. Now he’d have a far bigger reason to finish me off. I still had to run away, but he’d find me in no time at all unless I could adopt another identity. I flicked through Emma’s wallet. She had a driver’s license with a blurry photograph that looked enough like me that I could use it for identification. Emma didn’t need it anymore. Using it would be a kind of tribute to her and give
me the new beginning I needed.”

  “What about Emma’s parents?”

  “They came from up the Sunshine Coast somewhere. A mudslide flattened their house when Emma was in kindergarten. They both died. Emma lived with her aunt, her dad’s half-sister, but they weren’t close.”

  “Still, the police would have asked questions, right? Or the aunt?”

  “The cops assumed the bag was mine. And I think Emma’s aunt thought the wallet got lost in the gutter or something. With Emma dead, there was no need to fuss about it. It never came up. Anyway, I didn’t start using the new identity until I got to Vancouver.”

  “Even so, sooner or later someone from Victoria who’d known you both would have bumped into you and blown your cover.”

  “I know. But I didn’t intend it to be a permanent identity switch – I could always go back to being Agneta later. All I could think about was that Ricky wouldn’t start searching for a dead person.”

  It was a crazy scheme but I could see how, in the desperate state she was in, it must have seemed like a path opening up in front of her. “So you came to UBC and started out fresh?” I said.

  “And met you,” she replied.

  I expelled a leaden breath. Her story was sad, but believable. But it still didn’t explain her betrayal on the warehouse rooftop.

  She reached out and grabbed my hand in hers. “And now I only have one more thing to tell you about,” she said. “The thing you’ve always wanted to know. The thing I’ve never told you or anyone else.”

  *

  “Things were good in Vancouver,” she began, “I enjoyed my studies and felt freer than I had in my life before.”

  “Then I ruined it,” I said.

  She laughed lightly. “I had no intention of getting involved with anyone for a long time,” she said. “Then I met you and that quickly changed. You were so different. The first real male friend I’d ever had.”

  “So what went wrong?”

  Suddenly her expression darkened. “Didn’t you notice, Mike? Didn’t you notice even once?”

  “Notice what?” I had no idea what she meant.

  “When I got edgy, tense? The times I would suddenly stop in the street and stare into the crowd?”

  “I thought that was just nervousness about the heist.”

  “It was more than that. I had a hunch even then. Several times I was almost sure, then one night I became certain. Do you remember that Friday night in the Students’ Union bar, a couple of weeks before we did the museum job?”

  I thought hard, but couldn’t recall anything in particular.

  “It was dead crowded, like it always was at that time of night,” she continued. “We’d found two seats at a small table in the middle of the room and talked about the warehouse, about getting up on the roof. No-one could overhear us among all the noise so we felt safe to discuss it. You said you were working on getting the tools we’d need.”

  At last a vague recollection came to me of an evening when she hadn’t been her usual self and had insisted on going home early. I’d ascribed it to . . . well, the usual feminine stuff I suppose.

  “After about an hour you went up to the bar for another couple of pints. Someone walked behind me, brushed against the back of my head, heading for the door. I looked around and saw the guy’s back and a little of his profile.”

  She shuddered visibly. “It was him, Mike. It was Ricky. It had taken him a while, but he’d found me.”

  I stared at her. “You’re sure it was him?”

  “Of course I’m sure. Maybe he was drunk and stumbled against me accidentally or maybe that’s how he meant it.”

  I frowned. “He must have done some lateral thinking when he was spaced out. Figured out your ruse.”

  “I suppose so. Anyway, you can imagine how scared I was after that. I . . .”

  “Emma, hold on a minute,” I interrupted, “How come I never noticed something was up with you after that? I’m not that thick.”

  “No you’re not, Mike. From then on I made up my mind to hide it from you.”

  “Why?”

  “Maybe I hoped he’d just go away.” She shrugged. “And think how you’d have reacted if I had told you.”

  I did. She was absolutely right. I would have been disgusted at her recent past and the type of lowlife she’d got intimately involved with; but I would have tried to protect her by confronting the rat who was stalking her. Neither response would have worked: the first would have damaged, probably ended, our relationship; the second might have ended me. Ricky sounded like the sort of mean bastard who would carry a lethal weapon on him for just that sort of confrontation.

  “I kept checking for him everywhere I went, but never let you see me doing it. For the next few days there was no sign of him. I began to think he’d decided I wasn’t worth the trouble and had gone back to Oak Bay.”

  “But he didn’t?”

  “Deep down, I guess I knew better. Ricky would get off on stalking me. He’d never stop, and you were in his sights now too. That scared me even more. Sure enough, the following week I saw him again. I was writing an essay in the library and someone on the far side of the stacks sat down directly opposite me. I looked up and it was him. He didn’t say anything, just smirked at me.”

  “He was enjoying stalking you.”

  “That’s right. I was frantic with worry; didn’t know what to do. By now I wanted to tell you but couldn’t think how to. It was only a few more days until we planned on doing the heist. I thought if I could just hang on until then, we’d have money to get away.”

  “Run away to some tropical island? We’d have been running forever.”

  “I guess so. But I didn’t see him again on campus after that.”

  I was confused. “He went away after all?”

  She looked directly into my eyes. “No Mike. The next time I saw Ricky was the night of the heist.”

  *

  “It’s so obvious now with hindsight. He must have known where I lived in halls, and he must have known about you. He would have followed us to find out what we were up to. Let’s face it, we weren’t exactly very professional back then.”

  “That’s true.” I was beginning to guess where this was going. If I was right, I could imagine how much she’d tried to forget all this.

  She turned to me, her face expressionless, skin drained porcelain white. “He was there, Mike. On the roof.”

  I said nothing, decided to just let her talk.

  “You were down in the room below, had been for a while. I was dead nervous, couldn’t see what you were doing and wondering what was keeping you so long. Then you came up at last; handed me the bags. I set them down at the edge of the skylight and heard a noise behind me. It was him. Ricky. He shone a flashlight in his face so I would know.”

  “You must have been scared to death.”

  She folded her arms even tighter around herself. “He was grinning from ear to ear; pumped up on whatever crap he was injecting back then,” she said. “I read the look in his eyes, forgot about the bags, just got up and ran.”

  She looked at me, sadness on her face. “I’m sorry I abandoned you.”

  “You had good reason.” Finally, I’d said it. I never thought I would, but I meant it. She’d had a very good reason for abandoning me. I felt like an enormous boulder had finally slipped off my shoulders. One that had burdened me for a decade.

  “At first I thought he wasn’t coming after me.”

  “That’s when he must have been messing with me. Tossing stuff on my head.”

  “I got to the plank and ran across it to the church.”

  “Ran across?” I well remembered being splayed flat out on that plank as I’d inched my way along it. If the Devil himself had been after me I doubt that I could have crossed it standing upright.

  “I don’t know how I did it; I remember looking down at my feet flying past each other on the narrow wood, and seeing the ground far below. All of a sudden I was on the other side
. I was so afraid that what I’d just done didn’t register until long afterwards.”

  She stared into space, obviously reliving the scene. “When I got over I looked behind me and there he was, cocky and laughing. He started walking across the plank as if it was nothing; must have thought: Anything she can do . . . I was absolutely panic-stricken by then, Mike. I was hyperventilating. I had to stop him.”

  “So you did.”

  There was a long silence.

  “Go on,” I said quietly.

  She opened her mouth, paused then continued. “Yes, I did. I didn’t even think about it. I pushed on the edge of the plank with all the strength I had; broke a bunch of nails but I got it moving. It slipped off the edge of the wall right in front of me.”

  She hesitated. “After that, everything seemed to happen in slow motion. Ricky’s expression changed; for the first time ever he looked scared. Then . . .”

  “Then?”

  “Then he was gone. I looked over the edge and saw him below. There was a spike railing sticking out of his chest. For a few seconds his arms flailed around, then he was still. I turned away and didn’t look back again.”

  “Did you think about me?”

  She turned towards me, pain all over her face. “Yes, I did, Mike, I swear I did! But what could I do? The plank was gone, I had no way back.”

  I didn’t say anything, just watched her wring her fingers nervously.

  “I was hoping you wouldn’t get caught, Mike. But even if you did, at most you’d only get a few months in prison or maybe even a suspended sentence for a first offence. Me? I thought I was looking at a murder charge. You can’t imagine the state I was in.”

  I tried to put myself in her head that night. The more I succeeded, the less I felt like condemning her. “What did you do next?” I said.

  “Somehow I got a late night bus back to my room at UBC. I flung my stuff into cases and fled back home to Oak Bay; got there about midday. My mum put me straight to bed with a sleeping pill and I slept the rest of the day and through the night.” She shuddered. “The postman rang our doorbell the next morning and I started screaming. Couldn’t stop. My mum and dad decided I was on my way to a nervous breakdown. They insisted on involving the medicos and I spent the next few days under sedation.”