by Steve Mosby
And I held him there. Looking out over the field, and then glancing back at the bank behind me. Charlie was calling me: still quite a way away. Maybe if she was closer I would have stopped: I could keep thinking like that. My mind was calm now. The panic would come afterwards, I was sure, but for now there was only silence, as I carried out this unreal thing that it had been telling me not to all along while at the same time knowing I was always going to.
He fought for a minute or so, but I was stronger than he was. And that’s what life’s about, isn’t it? You fuck up, you fight with all your might, and then you die anyway.
I met Charlie halfway back through the woods. We saw each other from quite a way off and she waited for me as I walked towards her, head bowed. I scratched my nose, looked up at her and shrugged as I reached the place she was standing.
‘He got away.’
‘Too bad.’ She noticed my clothes. ‘Jesus – you’re soaking.’
I looked down at my leg and my arms.
‘Yeah. I took a tumble into the beck. My hand’s pretty sore.’ I looked at it, pretending that it hurt or appeared injured in some way. ‘He took off over the field, and I figured I was done in.’
‘Thanks for trying.’
She smiled at me, but looked a little shaken.
‘You really beat the shit out of him,’ I said, trying to make light of the situation. But my face just wouldn’t smile. Every time I tried, it just slipped away.
She said, ‘I think he had it coming.’
And then she shivered. ‘The adrenalin’s kicking in, though. I’m a wreck. Think I hurt my hand on him, too.’
‘Let me have a look.’
Suddenly, I was this world expert on injured hands. I took up her small fist and examined it. Already, between her first two knuckles, the skin was darkening. It happened to me a lot when I went bare-fist on the Scream, and I figured she’d be okay.
‘You’ll live,’ I said, letting go of her hand.
She rubbed it.
‘Well – bit of excitement, anyway. Think we should report it?’
‘I doubt it.’ I looked behind me. ‘He’s long gone.’
‘Probably think twice before he does that again, anyway.’
‘I would think so.’ I smiled at her, but it faded again. ‘Where did you learn to do that stuff?’
She struck a stance.
‘Second-dan gojo-ryu,’ she said. ‘I’ve been training since I was eight.’
‘Jesus.’
She relaxed. ‘You still want to go for that drink?’
‘I think I really need it.’
‘Okay, then. Let’s go.’
So we walked back up to the path and together followed it all the way to the ring road. In better circumstances, it might have reminded me of walking with Amy. I don’t know how I would have felt then, but it hardly even registered now. I was like a zombie, grunting in the right places to everything Charlie said. I’d left the thinking part of me back down by Lacey Beck, and it was still kneeling there now, squatting beside Kareem’s corpse and keening like a frightened, abandoned child as the water washed over him.
CHAPTER SIX
When forensic experts want to recreate a murder victim’s face from the skull, they stick little plasticine pegs at key points on the bone structure – at the right height for the ethnic origin and gender of the skull, which is determined by size, shape, and so on – and then they join those points up with strips and fill in the spaces in-between. My relationship with Amy was as complicated and intricate as a human face, but you could begin to see the shape of it in the same way: by picking out key points and then filling in the missing details later.
Year 0:
We meet.
Year 0.3:
I tell her that I love her.
Year 3.0:
I propose; she says yes.
Year 4.5:
She disappears.
Those might well have been four of the most important moments of my life, so they’ll do as starting points.
We met by having sex, which is as good a way as any despite what your mother might have told you. The Fusee-Lounge was late licence by then: a student bar constructed out of the remains of an old aeroplane. I forget the exact model but it was one of those big ones. They’d taken out most of the original fittings, widened it, fitted a bar down one side and covered the rest of the area with seats, games machines and pool tables. It was a popular place. The DJ played loud punk and industrial, the lighting was dim, and you could drink and jump around until one or two in the morning, each and every night. For Graham and me, it was like a new playground, but with a better selection of booze.
It was Friday night when I danced into Amy: probably about half-past one. I’d sunk enough alcohol to kill a small village, and the dancefloor probably would have cleared around me if there’d been any room for people to move away. Luckily, Amy was as drunk as I was. Our bodies found each other, and it seemed easier to kiss each other than do anything else, so we did. It was late enough by then for us to make it last, and then we went home together and had sex that, given the circumstances, was pretty spectacular. Neither of us was sick until afterwards, anyway. Even better sex the next morning told of what might have been, and we just . . . sort of carried on. Saw each other the day after, and then the next. Went on a few dates; ate a few dinners. By the end of week two, we were in a RelationshipTM, and neither of us had a problem with it.
I bought a bog-standard pint of beer for me, and a bubblegum flavoured bottled drink for Charlie. Mine was brown, whereas hers was an awful kind of murky green. As we made our way over to a table in the corner, it felt as though everybody was watching me and memorising what I looked like for the investigation to come.
Ugly fella. Tall. Kinda solid.
There was a camera above the main entrance, but by the time I’d seen it it had been too late. I did my best to look away to the left as we came in, but I don’t think I really pulled it off.
Clothes looked damp – and kinda muddy, too.
We slid in around the table and ended up sitting beside each other on the corner. I was already wondering how long I had to stay, and whether there was a back entrance to this place I could escape through.
‘Thanks for this,’ Charlie said, touching the neck of her bottle with delicate fingers. ‘My father would never approve. He’s a real-ale man.’
‘Is that right?’ I was looking around.
‘Uh-huh.’ She took a swig, and the liquid chinked. ‘He brews his own. Does wines and things, too. There’re demijohns in our attic that have been around longer than me.’
I smiled. Took a sip of my own beer.
Awkward silence.
It was dark and subdued inside the Bridge: everything and everybody was silhouetted by the bright white light of the day outside. Even the slot machines seemed muted, as though wary of making too much noise this early on. Blue smoke was spiralling up from ashtrays. You could actually see the air in here: like mist the colour of gun-metal. A television in the corner was showing horse-racing, but the sound had been turned down until the commentary was nothing but a low murmur. Everybody was watching brown animals pounding soundlessly over green grass.
‘So,’ Charlie said after a moment. ‘How are you doing?’
‘I’m doing okay.’ I nodded. ‘I’m not doing too badly.’
I looked at her, darkened by the window behind her. She looked different, I realised.
She’d cut her hair since the last time I saw her.
‘You haven’t been in recently,’ she said.
Or she had make-up on. Maybe that was it.
‘No.’
I was actually thinking that I’d just killed a man. An undertone of thought that rested below all the others. It was almost unreal.
I’d just killed a man.
She said, ‘It must have been a few weeks by now.’
Perhaps I should just get drunk, I thought.
‘It’s been a month and a half,’ I
said, picking up my glass.
A month and a half of paid unwork. I’d received my payslip for the end of March and was half-anticipating one for the end of April. After that, I had a feeling they might start to dry up.
‘People have been worried about you.’
I thought about it.
‘I’m sorry that people have been worried. I mean, I never meant to worry anybody. I didn’t think anyone would care, to be honest. It just . . . got to the point where I couldn’t come in anymore.’
I didn’t know how to explain it any better than that, even though that didn’t really explain it at all. It really hadn’t been a decision I’d made so much as an epiphany: something that happened to me. Somebody else made the decision, and I just realised how much sense it made. I think I did quite well, actually – for a couple of months after Amy vanished, I laboured into work on a morning, through work during the day and then out of work again in the evening: a good, solid pretence of normality. It’s what you do, after all. I was carrying on; I was surviving. My mother would have been proud of me. And then, one day, I realised that I wasn’t surviving at all: quite the opposite. I was being assimilated, and I was slowly dying, one day at a time.
‘You couldn’t come in?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘It just didn’t seem worth it anymore.’
I worked for an insurance company. Let me briefly explain how insurance works – in the lower levels, at least. Let’s say you want to insure your house. The first thing you do is get a quote from my company, and in order to do this you have to fill out a breathtaking number of forms and provide us with an almost insurmountable mountain of personal information. This is only to confuse and lull you. What it boils down to is this. You live in a semi-detached house with x number of bedrooms in a certain post code (down to the street name). Now, we know – from our vast database of prior claims and police reports – exactly how likely you are to be burgled or for your house to burn down or whatever, which we read as: how long will it take this person to claim one thousand pounds from us? On average, let’s say, it would take you five years, so we need to charge you two hundred pounds a year in house insurance to break even. It might take less time or it might take more, but the beauty is that they cancel each other out: that’s the benefit of betting on average.
This is a simple matter of simple mathematics.
We charge you two hundred pounds a year to break even, and that’s after your claim, if you claim. In reality, of course, we charge you more like three hundred pounds a year, but the amount is entirely variable. Whatever percentage profit we want to make, we make. There is no grey area. There is very little in the way of doubt, and we don’t make many mistakes.
We’re affiliated to several banks. They keep our accounts and, in exchange for our custom, they direct their own customers our way. They advise it, in fact. What would you do if your house burnt down tomorrow? they ask, frowning with worry. What if you were burgled and lost it all? They’re quite blatant. The sensible thing to do is to take whatever quote we give you and store that much money away in a separate account of your own each year. That way, if you do get burgled, you have the money to act as your own insurance company; and when you don’t get burgled and your house doesn’t burn down, you haven’t given all your hard-earned money to a complete stranger.
We didn’t work at that end of things, Charlie and I. We worked at the end that tries to fuck you out of the money if and when you do eventually claim. We found clauses you never suspected were there. In a way, we couldn’t lose – even if we ended up paying you, we knew the company was making a profit regardless. But we gave it our sportsman’s best, anyway, because every penny counts. Customers often got angry when they realised that we weren’t their friends, after all. That, at the end of the day, either they lost money or we did. And guess what?
‘Do you still feel like that? I mean, are you going to come back to work soon?’
I thought about it, even though I didn’t need to, and then shook my head.
‘I don’t think so, no.’
Even if I found Amy, I wasn’t going back. I’d let my life unravel to such a point, now, that it would be all but impossible to tie it back together again. For once in my life, there were no plans for the future. I really couldn’t imagine what was going to happen.
Okay, so what was she like?
Amy had brown curly hair, with streaks of gold that seemed yellow in the sun, and a warm, happy face that always looked flushed and enthusiatsic. Not exactly beautiful, but pretty – and far too confident and in love with life for it to be an issue anyway, at least to begin with. I know that’s a cliché – but for what it’s worth she was in love with life in the real way, not the fairytale way. Most of the time, she adored it; some of the time, though, she could barely face the day. That’s love for you.
She was slim, but curvy. And she was sexy as anything, but you’ll have to take my word for that. Imagine your ideal person. Amy probably didn’t look like that, but she had the effect on me that the person does on you. There were days when I almost had to pinch myself. It seemed like a whole fresh side of me had opened up.
I told her that I loved her after a few months; I don’t remember exactly when that was, but – if you really want to know – she told me first. In fact, she was very definite about it: she loved me from about the fifth week, and then, at three months, she was in love with me. It took me just that little bit longer to come out with it, but I tried it on for size eventually and found that I liked it. I love you. You should have seen her face light up when I told her that. She always looked happy, but when I told her that I loved her she looked like she was going to explode with joy.
I mean, have you ever seen joy in someone? Not just happiness, but actual joy? That was one of the only times I ever have, and it was like the sun came out inside her. Like everything just flipped right-side up. Suddenly, I couldn’t hold her tightly enough, and she held me back just as hard, with the back of my shirt bunched up in her small hands and her knuckles digging into my shoulder blades. Have you ever had somebody grip you with a passion you never thought existed outside the fucking movies? As though they found you the most precious thing in the world? I felt it then, and couldn’t believe that somebody would actually want me that much. I don’t believe in Heaven as a place, but I sometimes think that if a person could write down how I felt at just that moment – if they could describe it perfectly – then that sentence would be something like Heaven to me. And as a final resting place, I’d be happy to have my name shrunk down and rested, invisibly, on the collar of the full stop at the end. That would be fine for me.
‘What are you going to do?’ Charlie said.
‘You miss making me coffee?’ I did my best to smile, but I could still feel the ice cold water rushing over my hands as I drowned Kareem. My bones hadn’t quite thawed out yet.
She smiled back, playing with the neck of her bottle but then looked away.
‘Yeah. I miss making you coffee.’
The way she said it made me realise I’d come off as sounding too playful.
‘I kind of miss it, too,’ I said. ‘But that’s all I miss, and most of the time I don’t even miss that. It’s moments like those that cloud everything over.’
‘Cloud what over?’
I shrugged.
‘The fact that we work for something intrinsically evil. In a benign way, if that makes any sense. We spend our days fucking good people out of their money. That’s the reality. The appearance is that you make me coffee in the morning, and we have a laugh, and we take the piss out of Williams behind his back. We’re okay people. I mean, we are okay people.’
‘Well, yeah.’
‘We take our cheques at the end of the month, and that’s the only important thing.’
‘Everybody’s got to eat, Jason.’
‘Yeah, everyone’s got to eat. Exactly.’ I sat back, listening to the cars shoot past outside. ‘Everybody has to eat. So it’s all okay.’
&
nbsp; ‘Is that why you’re not coming back? Because of this.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Well, not really. Maybe a bit. If Amy was here then I’d still be in work; still carrying on like before. But she isn’t, and it’s put things in perspective for me. It’s a waste of our fucking time to be doing something so worthless.’
That was an understatement, but I couldn’t describe it any better. The thing is, a working life is one of those things you’re taught to respect and admire. Because a man pays his way. A man supports his family. There’s no such thing as a free lunch. And so on. In reality, what you have are thousands of people doing the same thing, day after day, and it’s not admirable: it’s tragic. It’s just a convincing fiction. So for a while after she disappeared, I shuffled back to work, all the time knowing deep down that the most important thing was Amy and the fact that she wasn’t with me. It got harder and harder, as though I was tied by elastic to something in the past, and each day was one miserable footstep forwards. So I stopped going in – just made the decision one day – and it felt like an enormous weight had been lifted off me.
I felt like I had a purpose again.
I felt like I was looking at the scenery, for once, rather than just speeding past.
What I didn’t feel was guilty, worthless, small, tragic or pitiful. For the first time in years, it felt like I’d taken hold of my life by the scruff of its neck, like a spitting, scratching cat, and turned its angry face around to have a good, honest look into its eyes. If I ever let go I’d have myself slashed to shit, but that didn’t feel important: whenever you grab a tiger by the tail, you know you’re going to get scratched eventually. You don’t take it as a career path. It’s not a long-term thing. It’s just an awesome thing.
‘Are you looking for her?’ Charlie said.
‘As much as I can. I have a friend who helps me. We’ve made some ground.’
‘What about the police?’