by Stella Duffy
Burn scars stretched beyond breaking point, the soggy thud of thick-bruised muscle, roar of spilt blood in her ears and the torn sound of frail flesh louder almost than her rasping breath. Almost. The beating kept coming in a relentless torrent and, bliss unconsciousness agonizingly distant, the pain wouldn’t stop either, even when Luke left her alone for a second to get his breath. Hurt shuddering through her in nauseous waves, from smashed head down to broken toe and, achingly conscious still, back again. Half-grasped words of Lees’ ranting far-distant, same old subject in his mouth, same old battle in his addled head. Georgina screaming at both men to stop their noise, their violence. As if the whole thing had taken no time at all and then again as if it were never going to stop. As if the hurting and the noise and the hammering blows were never going to stop.
FORTY-EIGHT
Luke had been waiting in the hall while Georgina went into Lees’ living room. They’d both heard Saz’s voice inside the room, trying to make sense of what Lees was saying to her. Georgina had rightly guessed that Saz would go to see her father once she knew Sukie had died. Luke listened in the hallway to Saz’s argument with Georgina and knew he believed Saz to be right. Knew that he thought the truth should have been told long ago, that he wished he had not had to benefit from his father’s lying. That if anyone should pay, it ought to be Lees. Unfortunately, he also knew Georgina was completely safe. That was why she was still able to stay so calm about it all. The adoptions had been Richard Leyton’s transactions and even though she now knew the truth, she could always claim the privilege of client confidentiality. He hated Leyton for that. For protecting his little girl even after his death, while the rest of them had to put up with all the shit.
Luke was not rational. There is no rationality in beating someone into unconsciousness. Or worse. He really wanted to beat shit out of Lees, his fist and foot aching to smack into the guts of the myth-man Georgina had told him all about. But Lees was no great genius. The bloke Luke saw when he crept into the room behind Saz was an old man, talking bollocks, ranting words and nothing. He wanted to smash out at Georgina, but she was so controlled – and controlling. Knew too much about him. So there was just Saz left. And all this had been brought up by her, of course, so in many ways she was to blame. Mindless violence. Of course, it was only later that Luke put an order to his rage. In the moment of the fight, it was merely the sound of fist into flesh that mattered.
Saz lay crumpled at the bottom of the bed. It was a narrow single bed and the room was dark, dark because there were no windows. When the building had been converted this had been intended merely as an additional feature designed to give the place greater selling power. No attic, no basement, but one tiny room at the end of the hallway, perfect for conversion to a miniature office, ideal for a small child’s playroom, or just useful for storage. Human storage. Saz lay where Luke put her. She had not moved for four hours.
When Saz did regain a semblance of consciousness she thought at first that she was dreaming. Nightmaring. There was no piece of her that didn’t hurt. Hurt too small a word. Didn’t screech – fingernails on blackboard, brakes too late – didn’t scream out for attention, for help. And, as she very soon realized, no way of moving so as to minimize the extremity of pain. There was no place of comfort. Saz fell in and out of wakefulness some times for just seconds at a time, at others for much longer. Longer than she thought she could bear to be sensible of her own suffering. In those periods she knew she should try to stay awake, that she shouldn’t let what was no doubt a fucking terrible concussion lapse into something worse, understood the rational medical reasons for staying conscious in the place of hurt. But she didn’t really want to, the pain was too great. And anyway, Saz had no control over the alertness or otherwise of her mind. The otherwise of her mind that far preferred to drift off into the place of less pain than stay awake and allow her to remember again the savage beating that had led her here. Saz had no idea what had led her here. Though there was a sense that maybe this was what had happened to Sukie, that maybe it was her turn now. She remembered an argument with Georgina, her own insistence on the necessity of complete truth. As Saz’s battered lungs rasped through pooled blood for stale air, the value of total honesty seemed more than a little questionable.
But not to Luke. Some part of him desired understanding. He explained what had happened. Explained though Saz could only hear half of it – wanted to hear still less. Luke knew his temper had long been a problem. Something he’d inherited from his not-mother, something he kept honed with copious quantities of whisky and coke, sharpened further by a life of not enough sleep and too many money worries. He’d been a little fucked when he turned up at Lees’ house. Georgina had told him about Sukie and it upset him more than he cared to say. He had never intended to hurt her so badly, he’d just believed Georgina when she told him that Sukie was prepared to tell everything. And he had too much to lose to allow her to do that. He hadn’t meant to go so far when he went to see Sukie, he just intended to frighten her a little. But she would keep turning the other cheek.
Saz slipped in and out of painful sleep, moments of agonizing consciousness laced with Luke’s interminable story. It was Georgina who first told Luke the truth about his adoption, had sought him out when Richard Leyton gave her the truth about her own life, found him by going through Leyton’s papers and looking up the adopted children herself. She already knew Patrick; he wasn’t worth trying. She knew about Saz’s friend, Chris, and had guessed there would be little potential there. But apparently Luke was ideal. His situation back then was not happy. He was not especially close to his adopted father, was an angry young man easily persuaded of the cause of his unhappiness. Clearly lack of money was all that was keeping him back and, according to Georgina, lack of money was the easiest thing in the world to rectify. No, of course Jonathan Godwin had not wanted to put his money into his gay son’s nightclubs and bars – it didn’t suit his image at all. But then, when Luke had first asked his father for help, he’d had nothing to bargain with. Now he had Georgina behind him, and knowledge. Which was power to a potential blackmailer. Suddenly Jonathan Godwin was more than happy to back his son’s enterprises. Saz should have been interested in his story, but something else was going on, something that required her more urgent attention than Luke’s story of his unhappy life.
Something was wrong inside her body. Something more than the aching muscles and the rip in the re-torn muscles in her shoulder and the too-stretched burn scars. There was the broken nose, the probably fractured ribs, the eyes she knew she wouldn’t have been able to see out of even if the room wasn’t so dark. But Saz felt as if there was something else as well. Something she couldn’t quite get to, something wrong inside, internal, organic. Her breath went in and out, gurgling and painful both ways, but then it didn’t seem to really go anywhere. Like the oxygen wasn’t getting through, getting to the right place. She tried to raise herself on one elbow to help herself breathe, but either her arm wouldn’t work or her brain didn’t know how to tell it to move. Her brain didn’t know how to tell the rest of her to do anything. Air hung useless at the top of her lungs. Saz slipped from the dark room into a darker sleep.
When she awoke Luke had been out and returned with water and food. He ate a burger and offered her some. It wasn’t merely that Saz wasn’t hungry; the smell of the food made the bile rise in her swollen throat and threatened to choke her. She tried to speak to him, but her jaw wouldn’t work and even opening her eyes for a moment was a second too long. She welcomed the water he held to her mouth, let it fall over her broken skin, hoping that the rehydration might wake her up, help her to stir herself. Mere water couldn’t accomplish that much, but it did keep her awake enough to notice again the shooting pains high in her stomach, then down across her lower back. And the pain kept her from sleep long enough to hear the rest of Luke’s story. He was drinking again now, whisky this time, cheap from a local off-licence. Saz wanted the dark liquid for herself, blessed numbness o
f drunken stupor. But Saz couldn’t even reach out a hand, let alone ask for a drink. She was the perfect captive audience.
Luke was talking and Saz had no choice but to let the noise of his words wash over her.
“My mother just wasn’t interested. Not shocked or horrified like your Patrick’s mother. I told her what Georgina had told me, how Lees got the babies and she just said she’d believed him when he told her that the baby was stillborn. She’d wanted to believe. She didn’t want the baby.”
Luke finished the pint bottle and slumped back against the wall, “She said that if it turned out that Lees had been lying, then the lie had paid off. For all of us. Lees made his money, she got rid of an unwanted child, and I had a family who gave me everything. And fuck it, I realized she was right.”
Luke saw that he was her son. His drive to make a success of his life and his business – they were also her passions. She had been fourteen, turfed out of home after the first, fumbling, no-fun fuck with the next-door neighbour resulted in a mess of pain and pregnancy. Extremely religious family, horrified by what they saw as her betrayal. Nowhere for her to go, but they packed her off anyway. Didn’t want her dirty soul to infest the pure home any longer. A week on the streets, praying that cold and hunger might make her miscarry, and then she turned herself over to the authorities, turfed up at the hospital believing they had an obligation to look after her. They did. Lees did. She told Luke she remembered him as the kind man who promised her it would be fine now. And it was. She was fed and clothed and given a bed. It wasn’t home, but then her own home had never been that comfortable or easy either. And it was quiet, she was left alone. Every time Lees came to see her, he reassured her, everything would be all right in the end. She wasn’t to think about how she would cope with the baby, it would be taken care of. She was a child herself, she just needed to eat and sleep and rest. So she did.
Three months later there was the long and arduous labour. Girl body doing a woman’s work. Then in the end the Caesarian anyway and the baby removed quickly, too small, not well, and she felt herself falling into anaesthetic sleep, drifting into the welcome ether kiss. The next day the nurse explained that Lees was coming to talk to her. The nurse was especially gentle that morning. Lees sat by her bed and held her hand and told her the baby had died. And she didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. Knew she was wicked to feel relief, but felt it anyway. She moved back home for a few years and worked out her time in the family that demanded payment for her transgression. Eventually she was old enough to move to London and found work in the City. Some years later she went to New York. She became a successful career woman, one for whom children and family were not a priority – work was all. She’d had lovers and partners and two husbands. But no children. It was what she wanted. And then Luke had come along. He did not know her, she did not know him. She hadn’t even known he existed until now. She didn’t know how to be a mother, it wasn’t in her nature. The truth was, it probably never had been. She could not be sorry, she simply was as she was. When Luke left, they shook hands. They did not meet again.
That night, Luke went home, drank most of a bottle of vodka, finished off half a gram of coke and smoked a few joints. Though he lay in bed thinking there might be tears, none came. At least not before sleep. He woke up the next morning cooler and calmer than he had been for years. She was right, his not-mother. She was so fucking right.
As he explained to Saz, “We didn’t need each other. And it was kind of a relief. Because she didn’t want me, she released me. She made it all so simple. I really was grateful to her for that, honestly. I got used to the idea that my birth mother wasn’t interested, and used to my own decision to not be interested in her. And then I talked to Georgina and she explained about getting my father’s money for the club. So in the end, I got everything I wanted. Until you turned up.”
According to Luke, Saz turning up was a bit of a fucking shame. Saz heard some of the story, maybe most of the story, she couldn’t really tell and she certainly didn’t care. She was in no state to worry about Luke’s wounded soul. She fell asleep eventually and when she woke again he was gone. She would have cried if she could – with both loneliness and despair at being alone and in so much pain – but her swollen eyes and the salt of the tears made it impossible. It was becoming harder and harder to breathe now, had been for the past few hours. Like trying to swim underwater and not knowing how to come up for breath, swimming in dark water where you don’t know which way is up or down. And there was the other thing, the something else that was wrong, something far inside, under skin and muscle and flesh – that was not going away, it was growing. Saz felt nothing and then everything. Knew that this was as close as she had ever been to the edge, and then knew nothing at all for another hour. Tripping in and out of consciousness, sometimes Luke was there, at other times she lay alone in the dark. Time was now less relevant than her ripped fingernails, though she had no idea how that had happened anyway, two broken nails that had now multiplied into all ten. No comprehension until a single lucid moment when she remembered scratching at herself, in dreamtime in a place where she had thought if she could just get into the lungs that were filling up, just drain herself of her own blood, then perhaps she would be allowed to come up for air. Some part of Saz knew what to do, an animal piece dragged up from cave days and generations of healing grandmothers and weeks of evenings devoted to ER and Casualty. Saz knew if she could just get in and let it out, let out the own self she was drowning in, then she’d be able to breathe again. But she couldn’t get in, her hands couldn’t break through her own flesh, didn’t really want to, wouldn’t do as they were told. And then Luke had been gone for a while and Saz couldn’t even stay awake long enough to remember what it was she’d thought the last time consciousness had blessed her with the gift of pain and knowing.
Saz wondered if Molly was pissed off. Molly hated her being late. Molly would be worried. She’d be really fucked off. Saz shouldn’t see so much of Carrie, it only ever ended in tears. She would be a better girlfriend from now on, she would stay at home and be in bed by midnight and be perfectly happy to do so. She wasn’t going to worry Molly any more. She was going to be a good mother. Very good mothers. Saz kissed Molly, held her close and naked and smelt her girlfriend’s skin, the warm somewhere between sweet and sour that was the smell of just Molly. Before the perfume and the makeup and the clean laundered clothes. Saz held Molly, they held each other, heart to heart – not comfortable, not naturally easy, but Molly insisted on it anyway. Saz’s mouth opening for Molly’s tongue, the kisses on her face, breasts, back, thighs. Saz fucking Molly, gently for the baby, not gently for the lover. Saz’s arms aching for another five months of waiting.
Then Saz’s body was awake and screaming out again. Last scream, real scream, first time out of her mouth with actual noise in so many hours and raw and angry and primal and fierce and no Molly to make it better and then Saz knew she was definitely doing this alone and Luke was very long gone and had no more stories to tell and then, because she was so lonely and because it all just hurt too much, Saz was very glad to fall back into the dark.
FORTY-NINE
Molly waited until ten that evening before she called Chris. He sat with her and the two of them waited another two hours before they called Carrie. The waiting was less to do with protecting Carrie’s right to beauty sleep than with the fact that getting another person in meant they had accepted something was definitely wrong. As long as they hadn’t spoken to Carrie there was still the chance that Saz might be out with her. Unlikely, unusual, but not completely impossible. Molly dialled her number a little after one in the morning. There was no reply at first, but she let the phone ring anyway, just in case. Called on and on three times. Three times past the nice BT lady telling her there was no reply. Molly knew there was no reply. She could hear for herself that there was no reply. But she had no one else to call. She knew there was a chance Carrie was simply refusing to answer her telephone. She was rig
ht.
Carrie knew nothing about where Saz might be. And at first all she felt was extreme fucking irritation that Molly was being so paranoid. Until she remembered that Saz had said something about going to visit Lees by herself. She told Molly not to worry, she was sure things would be fine, but the minute she got off the phone she called both Helen and Judith. The two women were generally far too straight for Carrie to have much time for, but she’d known Saz to call on them in times of crisis and this felt horribly like just such an occasion. Carrie figured that even if Saz only stayed missing for the next hour, Molly’s concern was a good enough excuse. However, even if Helen and Judith were dykes, they were also police – too much fucking police for Carrie’s liking. The phone calls were fast, the tone concerned and businesslike, but not especially chatty. As soon as she put the phone down from her second call to Judith, Carrie called Molly back to say she was on her way north. Eventually. She then untied the brunette, they dressed as quickly as possible – far faster than either of them had ever managed before – and ran down to Bar Rage. Luke wasn’t there and Sharon reported, extremely pissed off, hadn’t been there all fucking night.