Approaching Zero

by R. T Broughton

  “Didn’t you know that he had a family?”

  “Hang on. You were on reconnaissance. How would I know that?”

  “They were all just lying on the floor and over the sofa,” Brady continued, staring out in front of herself, but seeing nothing. “Maybe three kids, a wife and him. Blood oozing out of their mouths.”

  “Oh my God! What the hell was in that envelope?”

  “I told you. It was just supposed to smoke the place up a bit.”

  “What have we done? My God, we–” The sentence was cut short by the sound of an ambulance outside the window, racing to the scene of the crime they had just committed. “My God!”

  Neither said anything until the sound of the siren had disappeared behind them and it was easier to imagine that the family were now receiving medical attention and may even survive.

  “Okay, we say nothing. We tell nobody,” Brady suddenly said, regaining something of the familiar composure that always helped Kathy feel better about whatever trouble they were getting into.

  “Okay?”

  “It might just blow over. We’ll check the news, see if we can find out if…” She paused. “So we can find out that they’re okay and then we keep our mouths shut. There’s nothing to put us up this end of town, we’ve never been in trouble before. We just carry on as normal, okay?”

  Kathy was staring out of the window and thought she might throw up.

  “Okay?”

  “Okay, Brady. Whatever you say.”

  Kathy didn’t really want to go back to Brady’s after that, but she had no choice. She could hardly call her mum and tell her that she wanted to go home. Her mum would have to know what had happened, why she was upset, and then the world would crumble around her ears. So they got back to Brady’s, barely talking to each other and sat in the bright, cluttered living room with Brady’s mum, looking for all who cared to notice that the world had come to an end. Kathy liked Brady’s house more than her own; it always seemed so vivid and full of life, with art on the walls from exotic parts of the world that she couldn’t name and features that her own mum wouldn’t begin to entertain—throws and beanbags, wall hangings, and a nude figure with an ashtray part of her head, although no one in the family ever smoked. Brady’s mum fit into the room perfectly with her wild Afro hair, larger-than-life personality and lounging stance on the chair. Relaxation was central to this house. But all of this failed to charm Kathy today and after more than an hour of tense silence, finally, in the interval of Coronation Street, Brady’s mum looked over to her miserable, silent guests and said, “Boobies!”

  Both girls were snapped from their reverie and looked over to Clara, who was grinning widely. She was a large woman who looked like she was smiling whether she was happy or sad and she always wore bright, colourful dresses. Kathy imagined that Brady had a dad somewhere who walked around with a belt of grenades and grease paint on his face because Brady was definitely nothing like her mother.

  “What did you say?”

  “I said, ‘boobies’!”

  The girls looked at each other then back at Clara and to each other again, at first locked into their seriousness, but eventually they could do nothing but crack and both of them collapsed into fits of giggles. The tension in the room lifted as if it were made of spaghetti and Clara had sucked it out of the air.

  “That’s more like it!” she told them, giggling along with them. “You can’t be serious when there are boobies in the world.”

  The girls looked at each other again and now just couldn’t stop laughing. Kathy couldn’t imagine her mum saying ‘Boobies’ to cheer her up, but she wasn’t sure that she wanted her to.

  “Why don’t you girls go upstairs and watch a film. I’ll bring you some toast in a bit. Maybe you could have a chat, clear the air. I don’t need to know what’s going on between you but you need to sort it out.”

  She was right. And when they got upstairs—to the only room not covered in bright colours, flowers, and ornate hangings—they both started talking at the same time, both wanting to say that they needed to stick together and pretend that nothing happened rather than stewing and looking so weird and stressed that grownups were starting to get suspicious.

  “It’s just that–” Kathy started to say, the worry evident on her face, but Brady stopped her.

  “No!” she said and held her hand up to Kathy’s face. “This ends here. There’s nothing more to talk about, Kathy. We spent most of the night here apart from when we went for a walk earlier. That’s the bottom line. Right!”

  Kathy tried to relax her face and put it to the side in the way that Brady seemed to find so easy. If only she were more like her.

  “Right, Rambo?” Brady then asked—although they both knew that Kathy didn’t have a choice—and they spent the rest of the evening watching a film that Kathy hated but had somehow had to sit through about six times.

  ***

  It wasn’t until the following day that they were updated on the smoke package situation. Clara had made ham sandwiches for breakfast, which was weird enough for Kathy to question whether everybody’s parents really were just nuts and this was an insane world in which to be growing up. They ate in the living room in front of breakfast television, which was a peaceful experience until Clara sat down on the armchair and disappeared behind the local paper. The girls could hear her tutting occasionally at all the bad things she found inside of it. But what was more worrying was the headline:

  Chemical Attack Terrorises Family in their Own Home.

  The sandwiches didn’t taste half as appetising after that and both girls were stricken into an almost robotic lack of motion, stopping deadly still between poses as if remaining stationary would somehow make it all go away. They were only reawakened when it was almost leaving-for-school o’clock and Clara folded the paper up and dropped it on the coffee table.

  “Right, five minutes, girls!” she said, even gleeful at this time of the morning.

  Without thinking, Brady snatched the paper and threw it into her backpack. “She won’t miss it,” she told Kathy’s concerned face. “Come on! Bye, Mum.” She shouted and the girls were on their feet and out of the door before Clara could respond. When they were far enough down the road to be unseen, Brady took the paper out of her bag and began to read. “Shit!” she said, and then, “Shiiiiiit!”

  “What?”

  “Shiiiit!” But there was a lightness to her voice, as if she were reading the plot of a really gripping and unbelievable movie rather than the fallout of the night before.

  “Tell me!”

  “Well, they’re all okay. Thank God! They’re in hospital and should make a full recovery. They would have died if it hadn’t been for the anonymous phone call. We saved their lives.”

  “Died? What the hell was in that envelope?”

  “Dunno! It’s still being tested, but they keep using the words ‘chemical weaponry.’”

  “Oh my God, we’re terrorists!”

  “Don’t be so dramatic, Kathy. They’re all right. We’re in the clear.”

  “So this is all right for you?”

  Brady folded the newspaper back into her bag and stopped to look at her friend. Kathy looked as if she might cry and as hard as Brady tried, she really couldn’t understand why. It had gone better than they had expected. The bastard ended up in hospital. He had to know that it was a warning because he’s such a pervert. She shrugged and this seemed to upset Kathy even more so she turned away and started to walk again, perhaps hoping that the physical act of walking would somehow help them to leave the night before behind.

  “We’re never doing anything like that again,” Kathy called to her. She hadn’t started walking again.

  Brady turned back and said, “Don’t overreact. No one was seriously hurt. We can still do a lot of good.”

  “Can’t you see? Do you think it’s all right to go around hurting innocent people? He had a family. Maybe I wasn’t even right about him. I didn’t think they had famili
es.” She swept her hand through her greasy hair. “This is too confusing. Do you think it’s possible that some men have dark thoughts but never act on them? Maybe that’s what I was getting from him.”

  “Don’t backtrack, Kathy. He’s a perv and you know it.”

  “Well I don’t care. From now on I’m just going to use the vapour rub and… and… we’re not doing it again, ever. It’s not safe. Promise me, Brady.”

  Brady looked searchingly into her friend’s eyes and could see the pain and urgency there. “I promise,” she said. And it was a promise she kept for the best part of twenty years, until the day Kathy started writing her list.

  Chapter 6

  Kathy hadn’t been on the bus for years. She was proud to have passed her driving test a few months after her seventeenth birthday and had saved up and bought a car not long after, helped by her nan of course. Nan was far from a soft touch, but when she moved into the house she felt she could breathe for the first time in her life. As she sat on the bus now, on her way back from the hospital, she really wished that her nan would be in the house waiting for her when she got back. There was nothing she craved more than her arms wrapped around her, telling her that it will all be okay, Kitty Cat. She always called her Kitty Cat. But it had been years since she passed now.

  The bus turned into Kathy’s road and she pushed the button. It was another hot day and simply making it down the stairs in time to get off at her stop left her breathless. Although she hadn’t actually broken any bones in the collision, it was clear that it would take her body a while to return to full strength.

  “Thanks,” she told the driver after slowly stepping off the bus and he pulled away without an answer. His was the only profession in the world where a person could actually become sick and tired of being thanked. Thankfully Kathy’s nan’s house—her house since her nan passed away—was just across the road. But rather than rushing over, she stopped to take in the view of it. She didn’t do this often as she normally just pulled her Mini up in front of it and burst through the door. However, at this distance, she could see that she hadn’t been looking after it. She knew that she hadn’t been looking after it—this fact was inescapable—but the sight of the overgrown patch of grass in the little front garden and the unruly hedge actually surprised her. Her grandmother would be turning in her grave.

  It was a beautiful, narrow, Victorian terrace house, three bedrooms, and Kathy understood it to have considerable value in the current market, but the dirty windows, broken guttering, and litter by the front door made it look as if squatters had moved in and wouldn’t be moving on any time soon.

  Kathy dragged herself across the road, up the short path and opened the front door. She left the key hanging to face the inevitable moment that she had been dreading since leaving the hospital—the full view of her battered face; she hadn’t dared look earlier. The enormous mirror in the hallway wouldn’t lie, but she approached it with the same reluctance that her thirteen-year-old self had done every single morning before school. The view that she found there, however, was so incredibly captivating that she couldn’t move. It may only have been superficial bruising, but the swelling gave her face a completely different shape and the purples and reds gave her an unreal, painted look as if a child had attacked her overnight with the kind of face paints that could make beautiful butterflies and elegant princesses but had clearly fallen into the wrong hands. She tried to pat her hair down but it pinged back defiantly. And she had been on the bus like this? She would have taken her car but she had no one to bring it to her and she wasn’t supposed to drive until her face healed a bit anyway. She would have got a lift back but there really was no one to ask. Her mother—who, if she had changed at all, had become even more fearful for Kathy’s safety as she grew away from her grasp—would probably have had a heart attack if she had called her from a hospital. By contrast, her dad was currently sunning himself in Australia. She had no money on her when she rode the bike into the paedo, so she would have been walking home if it hadn’t been for yet another kindly nurse who took pity on her with a few quid for the bus.

  “Yeah, she’s got no one, poor love,” she imagined the nurse telling other nurses in the staffroom, or her husband, or other volunteers at the soup kitchen where she obviously volunteered in her spare time. “So I thought I’d help, you know, give her a few quid.”

  Kathy pushed her face as close to the mirror as she could without head-butting herself, so close that she could see the broken squiggles in her bruises, until the image misted up with her breath. “Poor love, indeed,” she said, suddenly feeling even sorrier for herself and then pulled back, turning her head left and then right and then left again for as many different perspectives as possible. When she finally concluded that there was no such thing as a flattering angle and probably wouldn’t be for some time to come, she gave up on the mirror and returned to the front door to retrieve her keys and close the world out for the day. A bath: that would sort her out. That would make everything better.

  She tried to run up the stairs, but realised after the first few steps that her battered body wasn’t quite up to that yet and besides, there was so much clutter on the stairs—piles of book, magazines, shoeboxes of things that she had accumulated and was yet to find a place for—that she would have probably fallen and broken her neck anyway. She peeled off her layers before even reaching the magnolia bathroom with the floral transfers that her grandmother had loved so much, and sat on the loo as the bath filled with water, a mass of inviting bubbles dividing and multiplying on the surface and filling the room with a fragrance that promised to relax and rejuvenate her. She lazily began to count the bruises and scratches dotted around her naked body from the collision and knew that it would take more than a bottle of pink goo to bring her back to life. But as she stepped in amongst the steam and bubbles and sat down, a comforting shiver swept over her followed by something that really did resemble relaxation. She closed her eyes and all she saw there was the peachy glow of the underside of her eyelids. This was rare for her; left unchecked, her brain had no problem juggling issue after issue, filling her mind with images of all the world’s ills and her inability to really do much of anything about any of them. So she took advantage of the calm and stayed in the same position for more than an hour, with her eyes loosely closed and the soothing heat of the water transporting her to a place where she would stay forever if she could. With barely the energy to think, she surprised herself when she eventually found the energy to wash her body and shampoo her hair. This was definitely more of a chore than a luxury, but she remembered how the woman in the mirror had looked back at her, as if she had spent the night sleeping rough, and knew it was worth it. When she was soothed, scrubbed and rinsed, and then dried, moisturised and robed, she headed downstairs again. She wasn’t particularly hungry but she dropped a couple of slices of bread into the toaster and flicked the kettle on. It was easy to forget to eat; she had seen this in clients whose complex issues surrounding food were always difficult to resolve. Or rather, she had seen clients whose issues manifested in their relation to food, controlling each mouthful as if it represented one of the endless people who had caused them harm. Kathy simply forgot to eat but because of her profession she made herself and had consequently saved herself from becoming what her mother would call ‘dangerously thin.’ She was just thin at the moment, nothing more, nothing less.

  The toaster popped up and made her jump, from what she had no idea; she wasn’t particularly doing anything, she wasn’t looking at anything, although there was plenty to look at in the cluttered kitchen. She had gone through a stage of buying all sorts of appliances, pans and bowls for the kitchen—all of them big and bright. The idea had been to bring some colour into the space, which was painted an unappetising beige colour. But most of the things she had bought were still in the boxes or piled up unused. And she hadn’t quite got round to shifting the old appliances, pans and bowls that she was replacing. Consequently, even if Kathy hadn’t lost h
er appetite, it would be almost impossible to prepare a meal there. Every work surface housed a precariously balanced pile of pottery or china—colour and good intentions. Rather than worrying about the mess, she had stopped noticing it. And as she hung around the kitchen, it was as if her eyelids were still down, although she was walking around. She was clearly exhausted and resolved to eat the toast, drink the tea, check her emails, and take herself off to bed.

  The living room was cluttered for very different reasons to the kitchen. But as Kathy lowered herself onto the sofa and set the tea and toast on the coffee table, she was every bit as blinkered as she had been to the explosion of crockery and food mixers. This room had become a kind of HQ for her research, with each wall displaying heavily annotated maps, pictures of men and children and notes that she had made. Every surface in the room housed a pile of either books or papers and the odd plate was dotted around and cups with small carpets of green fur at the bottom. The actual carpet had once been a colour that belonged to the red family, but it had been so long since it had seen a hoover that it really could have been any colour. Kathy’s laptop was where she had left it, plugged into the wall, and she took it onto her lap and flicked it open. Before she could even access her email account, Brady’s face was flashing up in a little box at the bottom of the screen. Kathy answered the call and immediately wished that she hadn’t.

  “Kathy, where the hell have you been?” Brady spat furiously. She was dressed in her casual uniform—the green shirt with the open top button—sitting amongst greenery that gave absolutely no clue to where in the world she was Skyping from. “Holy shit! Your face!” she then said.

  “Cheers,” Kathy told her. “Like I didn’t feel bad enough anyway.” But Kathy was smiling inside. This was the first friendly face she had seen in days. She took a bite of the toast then gripped her cup and snuggled back on the sofa to tell Brady all about it.