by John Niven
Fuck it.
I took a step back and threw myself up at the frame. Glass smashed and wood splintered as it came free, cold air hitting my face as I slid it up.
From upstairs we heard her breaking into a run.
‘Hurry, Daddy!’ Walt screamed.
I lifted Walt up and pushed him through the gap, out into the freezing, stinging night. Behind me I heard wood smashing against brick as she kicked the cellar door open. A split second to decide.
Stay and try and fight her?
If she shoots you, she gets Walt.
As her feet came clattering down the wooden steps I grabbed both sides of the window casement, looking like a man launching himself on a bobsleigh run, and hurled myself at the narrow gap as, behind me, I heard her enraged scream, the boom of the gun and a windowpane beside my head exploding.
Then I was picking Walt up and trying to run through knee-deep snow, the black air freezing, wind whipping our faces, and my mind still giving its own detached commentary – She won’t be able to get through that gap. She’ll have to go back upstairs and through the house, buying you maybe sixty seconds. Your house, that gun in your desk drawer, is nearly half a mile away, through – as another loud crack rang out and I turned to see her; half hanging out of the tiny window, her gun arm flailing as she fired wildly and then she disappeared inside, yellow light spilling out across the snow.
We had come to the front corner of the house. A porch ran all the way round the building at shoulder height and the area for about ten feet all around her property was brightly lit by the porch lights. Beyond that it was blackness. In the distance I could see the lights of our house glowing softly: my office. The desk. The gun. ‘Walt, jump on my back and hold on.’ I grabbed the railings and pulled the two of us up onto the porch. The porch was covered, there was no snow, nothing to leave tracks in. I crawled round the corner of the house, keeping below window level, looking up through the window of her sitting room and seeing her coming charging down the hallway, heading for the front door. I clutched Walt to me and pressed against the side of the house as we heard the front door slamming open, her feet banging down the steps. I turned and carried Walt in a low crouch, running along the side of the building and round the corner to the back. I peeked around and saw her running back and forth in front of the house, frantic, confused, pointing the gun off into the night.
Going against every instinct in my being I pushed the back door open and crept back into the house, into the kitchen. The lights were off and in the darkness I felt my trainer splash in something thick and sticky. There, on the linoleum floor, in a pool of black blood, was a body. Edging closer, pressing Walt’s face to my chest, I saw it was Jan Franklin, part of her face missing. She must have popped into ours to find out what had been going on with the helicopter. Had she seen the bodies there? Why had she come here? The phone? ‘Don’t look, Walt.’ I stepped around the blood, scanning the room, part of me hoping to see a gun rack, a shotgun on the table. Nothing. Just an ordinary, tired, old suburban kitchen. I could hear her shouting our names now from the front. I looked out the kitchen window. That pool of light extending ten feet or so into the snow, darkness beyond it, a big pine just on the edge of the darkness. If we ran into the snow she’d see our tracks right away. I looked up at the roof of the porch, trying to think, trying to remember the layout of her house from the few times I had been there. I made a decision.
Carrying Walt I ran upstairs; crouching down in the dark house as we came to the first landing I saw her through a side window, running around the house, the big revolver gripped tightly in her fist, scanning the snow. A North Face jacket, black, thickly padded, lay on a chair on the landing and I grabbed it and wrapped it around Walt. A big picture window in front of us led out onto the roof of the porch. I opened it very gently and slid it up as quietly as I could and climbed out. I saw her run out into the snow, almost directly below us. ‘WILLIAM!’ she yelled into the night. I pressed back, hugging the darkness and watched as she ran on around the house. The porch roof was wide, maybe ten feet or so, enough for maybe three strides in terms of a run-up. Could I make it, carrying Walt? ‘Walt? Walt? Listen, son.’ I pressed my mouth to his ear. ‘We’re going to have to jump, OK? Just hang onto me. Hang on really tight, OK?’ He made a noise, a whimper, and wrapped his legs around my waist even tighter, his arms clutching around my neck.
I backed up to the wall of the house and took a deep breath. If I came up short – we were dead. If the snow wasn’t deep enough to break our fall, if I broke my leg or my hip – we were dead. I glanced back through the window, along the hall and out the window at the front of the house. I could just hear her shouting, screaming now. I ran, managing one, two, three powerful strides before I came to the edge and leapt off into the night, throwing us forward, trying to get as far into the snow as possible, aiming for just left of the pine tree. A split second of silence, falling through the sleeting snow, and then, with a heavy crump, we came down, sinking down three or more feet into it, freezing, shocked, but safe. I scrambled around and looked back.
We’d landed in the darkness beyond the lights. If you were standing on the porch looking out you’d see no sign of any tracks. I gathered Walt to me and pressed us down into the snow, watching the house. A burst of light as the kitchen windows lit up and I could see her in there, not thirty feet away – opening drawers, throwing things out, looking for something. A gust of wind above us and the snow started to fall even harder, huge thick flakes pouring down, melting through my hair, numbing my head, Walt wriggling beneath her jacket, me becoming sickeningly aware of the sweetness of her perfume in the fur collar.
She ran back out of the kitchen door and a white cone of torchlight cut through the night, snowflakes catching dazzling in it as she jerked the beam around, scanning randomly into the blackness beyond the porch lights. She gripped the rail and stared out into the night. ‘WHEN I FIND YOU,’ she howled. ‘I’M GOING TO CASTRATE BOTH OF YOU!’
She ran off again, back around the porch to the other side. When she disappeared I picked up Walt and started walking, pushing my way through thigh-deep snow, away from the house and off into the night, into the blizzard.
32
GOING INSANE WAS, obviously, a strange thing to experience. You always thought that if it happened to you you’d be conscious of it happening; that a part of your mind would still be capable of remaining aloof, aloft, of standing there and commenting on it, of saying, ‘Well, this is unusual, but we seem to be doing it anyway.’ But it wasn’t like that at all, that day in the frozen-food section of the Safeway, when that lady – Isobel something – who you knew from your drama club put her hands on your shoulders and started speaking to you. You could see her lips moving but you couldn’t make out any words. No. What you did notice was that she was crying. You looked over her shoulder and saw your reflection in the smoked-grey plastic door of a freezer containing many types of frozen chips (your mind already automatically saying, ‘Oh, the boys like those ones with their gammon . . .’). You were wearing your pyjamas and a dressing gown. There were various stains down the front – egg, some blood maybe – and your hair . . . Jesus, your hair. You had long since stopped going near a mirror in the flat. Unwashed in God knows how long, it was like greased straw, sticking out in tufts and bunches, plastered to your face with sweat and tears. Looking down you saw the contents of the basket you didn’t even know you were carrying – a litre of Smirnoff, an air-freshener, some birdseed – you had no birds! – and Findus Crispy Pancakes, minced beef flavour (Craig’s favourite). You saw now that the supermarket manager and a security guard were standing off to the side, nervously watching Isobel talking to you (you could make out some of her words now: ‘Oh Gill, oh dear God, hen. What have you done to yourself?’) and the realisation hit you quietly, softly: ‘Oh, I see. I’ve forgotten I was insane and I’ve accidentally wandered out in public.’ It was as though insane was something it was perfectly acceptable to be behind closed doors. As lon
g as you kept it to yourself, what was the problem? They called an ambulance and you can’t really remember what happened after that. There might have been talk of having you sectioned but it never happened. Resources, you imagined.
And all the time, on the sofa, or lying on the carpet or the kitchen floor (you didn’t really go to bed any more, you just passed out wherever you happened to be, babbling the songs you used to sing to him when he was a baby: there were three little fishes in a little bitty pool and there were two little boys with two little toys and one man went to mow), you fantasised about how it would happen, how it would go.
A gun would be the best thing. A friend of Stephen’s – Alan something – had a shotgun. Single bore you remembered from when they’d gone out to hunt rabbits one time, down the shore at dawn. You wondered about where he kept it, how you could get it. The icy impersonal steel of the barrel in your mouth. Could you reach the trigger easily that way? Would you need a stick or something to press it? And then – just nothing. Just the back of your skull blowing up and all the billions of thoughts fizzing out in a pink mist, spattering porridgy on the walls, the curtains, the ceiling. Everything in there – Craig, Stephen – atomised. But you wouldn’t even know about that.
The sharp agonising bang the metal rails would make – on your forehead, on your knees – for a split second before the howling roar of the train made everything go away. (Would you feel it? you wondered disinterestedly. The wheels as they popped your head off. Severed your legs.)
The whooshing rush of cold air as you leapt from the top of the high flats; twenty storeys passing by. Old ladies looking out their windows seeing your dark shape flash past. You reckoned the drop would take around two seconds. Would you pass out? You’d heard people do. Would you feel it? Your whole body bursting open like a sac of blood.
The razor scraping against the wrist bone, horrible and alien, like polystyrene squeak and blackboard nails. The spurt your blood would make into the hot water; flowing thick and syrupy; terrible red bath gel, the kind of gift Craig would get you sometimes, from Boots in the mall. The Christmas gift set. Then everything getting warm and fuzzy and faraway, your chin slipping under the line, your own blood sweet in your mouth, fragrant in your nostrils.
Or like Stephen – the moment of no return as the stool clattered away beneath you, your feet lashing skittishly out, flailing for purchase. The rope bristling and ticklish as it cut into your neck, feeling your tongue swelling, filling your mouth, saliva spilling down your chin, your eyes bulging. Would you scrabble at the noose, realising too late you’d changed your mind? Would you still be conscious to feel the warm urine spreading down your thighs?
The salty Firth of Clyde filling your lungs when you could swim no further. Your clothes sodden and heavy as they dragged you down. And you were still strong. A strong swimmer. You’d make it quite far out. There were nuclear submarines out there in the Clyde estuary off the Ayrshire coast. You saw them all the time. Would you float down past one of those monsters? Tumbling weightless and dead past its gigantic black metal flank, its awful conning tower alone almost as big as one of the high flats. Its churning propeller sucking you towards it, the propeller the diameter of a house and deafening, the sound amplified underwater.
You remembered Craig explaining his physics homework to you once; how the force of an explosion was greatly magnified underwater. Something to do with the density of water itself. You’d been peeling potatoes, trying to get something into the oven, and you hadn’t really given him your full attention.
You would gladly undergo all of the deaths you’d imagined, all the deaths you could ever imagine, and more, many, many more, one after the other, just to have five minutes with him, just to put the fucking potato peeler down and listen to him talk about his homework.
Drunk, flying, you’d get all your cuttings out and pore over them: Craig’s face on the front page of the Daily Record. ‘MISSING!’ Photos of the frogmen on the banks of the river. Those silhouettes – Boys A, B and C. Then, later, after the Home Secretary’s ruling, the photos of Derek Bannerman (14), Thomas McKendrick (13) and William Anderson (13).
How you stared at these, tracing your finger over their faces, imagining, projecting.
The 1990s came and went and that might well have been it. Your life. Dead from cirrhosis in your fifties.
And then something happened.
It had been so long since you’d experienced good fortune that it took you a while to recognise it for the blessing, the opportunity it was.
Just after the millennium, Stephen’s Aunt Myra died. She’d lived in Inverness and you’d never met her. A spinster, Stephen had been the only living relative. The estate had been considerable, one of those old ladies with two houses and fifteen bank books under the bed. A cheque came via the lawyers for £180,000. You celebrated with a case of Smirnoff Blue Label.
Waking a few mornings later, fully clothed on the sofa, empty bottles and full ashtrays, dried sick on your navy cardigan, you had your very own ‘moment of clarity’.
Certainly you could use this money to quickly drink yourself to death. Or . . .
You could use it to try and get back what had been taken from you. Justice. Restitution. Vengeance. Whatever the world wanted to call it.
You poured the rest of the vodka down the toilet and you never drank again. You became something you never imagined yourself being.
A detective.
33
I STILL DO not fully understand how I managed to do what I did that night. The stories you hear about the drugs that lie dormant within the human body, the kind of superadrenalins that make it possible for women to lift cars off infants, for people to outswim pursuing sharks? They’re surely true.
My right leg throbbed from the impact with the ground. I had Walt, all sixty pounds of him, thrown over my shoulder, wrapped up in the North Face jacket, some of it covering my front as I stumbled further into the snow. My feet and legs were soaked, all extremities numb. I blinked as the snow stung my face, sweat and freezing water running into my eyes. Minus eighteen, easily. I had no real idea where we were heading, just trying to put more and more distance between us and her, the snow a godsend in one way; it was falling so fast it was covering our tracks. Walt cried and whimpered into my neck as I repeated ‘It’s OK. It’s going to be all right’ whenever I had the breath, my temples throbbing, my mind wandering randomly, crazily, as I gradually fell into a trance-like state.
I was William Anderson again, back in Scotland, back at school, Banny’s face looming out of the dark and snow in front of me, huge and terrible and sneering, Banny whispering to me, telling me terrible things, saying ‘you were always a wee fanny’, saying ‘ma da fucked me up the erse’. Tommy too; his throat gashed wide open, blood pouring from the corners of his mouth, his eyes just whites, no pupils, no irises, just white, awful blanks as he laughed his short, cruel, barking laugh. I saw my parents floating in front of me, sitting wordlessly in front of a television, my dad’s King Billy tattoo, snatches of the Orange songs he used to sing when he was drunk flickering through my head, ‘He was halfway up a nun, when King Billy shot his gun,’ and then the song was morphing into Duran Duran, into ‘Hungry Like the Wolf’, and Herby was bounding towards us through the snow, a barrel with ‘XXX’ stamped on it, like in the cartoons, like on Glen Michael’s Cavalcade I used to watch on Sunday mornings when I was wee, but then Herby got closer and I saw that he’d been cut in half – just the front half of a dog crawling towards us, the front paws pulling the whole thing along, an awful slick of blood trailing in his wake through the snow. And then, suddenly, we were surrounded by sunshine and clear spring air and I was back on that riverbank, almost thirty years ago, but this time I had a gleaming revolver in my hand, pointing the gun at Banny, and this time I could stop it all, make him stop, make me stop, and I was pointing the gun at Banny but he just walked towards me as I pulled the trigger and the bullets (the buttels, Walt, the buttels) just dropped feebly out of the b
arrel, tinkling harmlessly onto the concrete, but it was warm and sunny and I felt drunk, happy, delirious and I knew, knew it now . . .
I was dying of hypothermia.
I collapsed into the snow, Walt falling down on top of me, his weight beneath the jacket the only warmth I had. And suddenly the instinct was impossible to resist: to roll over in the snow, to burrow down, pull the cold blanket in over us and drift off to sleep. I was no longer shivering. I lay flat on my back and stared up into the uncountable snowflakes, hugging my son to me. Walt’s lips were blue, his skin almost translucent, his eyes partially open and glazed, dead. Come on, Walt, ma wee man. Take my hand. It won’t hurt, son. Let’s go. Let’s go and see Mommy.
And then Craig Docherty’s face appeared above us in the night sky: enormous and awful and grinning, like a star constellation floating luminous, coming down. He had no eyes at all, just great coils of pink worms, wet and writhing in the empty sockets, reaching down towards us like tendrils. A tiny crab scuttled out of his nostril and into his mouth and he was laughing.
No. We were not going to die here, in the fucking snow.
I hauled myself up, threw Walt back over my shoulder, and put one foot in front of the other.
After a few hundred stumbling, freezing yards I saw it up ahead through the blizzard. I couldn’t even be sure what it was at first, thought it was another mirage, a cruel trick of psychosis. I didn’t really believe it was real until I reached out and touched its cold breeze-block wall. It was our pool house and, in the distance, just a couple of hundred yards away, I saw now the weak yellow lights of the main house, just visible through the snow. We must have come nearly a mile, all the way to the back of our property. I pushed the door open and we fell in through a four-foot drift of snow.