by Matt Hilton
‘That’s it!’ Naomi howled. ‘We’re finished! Stop the car and let me out.’
‘No. I’m not fucking stopping.’
‘Let me out, Jack. You’ve gone way too far this time!’
‘I’m not stopping for nobody…you aren’t going anywhere til we get this sorted.’
‘There’s nothing to sort. I told you: We’re finished.’
‘No we’re not. We are going to sort this. Fucking hell, Naomi?’
‘God, I’m so sick of walking on eggshells around you. I’m not putting up with it any longer. Stop the car, Jack. Stop right now.’
‘No! You’re not finishing with me.’
‘You can’t stop me?’
‘Can’t I?’ My voice was a dry rasp. ‘I won’t let you go. I’d die before I let you finish with me.’
‘No!’ Naomi’s features folded in dismay. ‘Please don’t start making those kind of threats. You shouldn’t even kid about killing yourself.’
‘Who says I’m only going to kill myself?’ My eyes were extending out their sockets. ‘You know what would happen if you left me. I couldn’t live without you, Naomi. I want you…I’m going to take you with me! Don’t you remember last time? I warned you then what I’d do if you ever left me.’
‘You were just being stupid back then,’ she cried. ‘And you’re being stupid now.’
‘I’m not being stupid. I’m deadly serious. I’ll prove it.’ I yanked down on the steering wheel sending us angling for the opposing traffic. At the last second, I hauled the wheel the other way and the car swayed and jounced before I got it under control.
Naomi tugged at her seatbelt, unclipping it. ‘Stop the car and let me out. Please, Jack!’
‘No way.’
‘If you don’t stop the car, I’ll jump.’
‘Now who’s being stupid? Emotional blackmail only works when there’s a valid threat. If you jump you’ll be killed. I’m going to kill you. So where’s the fucking threat?’
Naomi pulled at the door handle.
‘What do you think you’re doing? Stop it!’ I thumped her in the face with my balled left hand.
Naomi got the door open. I grabbed her with my left hand, twisting my fingers in her hair.
‘Get off me, you psycho!’ Naomi yanked free, and a clump of hair was left dangling from my fingers. Desperately, she pushed the door open and I was sure she was about to leap from the car. Now way would I allow that to happen. I grabbed her hair again, a good fistful and yanked her inside. Screeching like a wild cat Naomi clawed at my hands. I released her to grab for the partly open door. Naomi went for my face, screwing her nails into my cheek. I clenched my eyes shut so she didn’t blind me. I warned her to stop but she wouldn’t. So I hit her. I hit her again, my balled fist pounding her face. I felt her grip loosen and began to open my eyes. I saw the wall on the corner plot. I pulled down on the wheel, aimed for the sharpest point at the corner.
Baaddoooom!
There was a starburst of colour and movement. No up, no down. Blackness. Whistling from inside my skull. Pain in my trapped leg. I let out a screech of anguish. I knew we’d crashed, had intended it. But it had never been my intention that either of us would survive.
Where was Naomi?
Her empty seat had collapsed, the support bolts having sheared away, pushing the headrest against the dash. Naomi wasn’t in the space beneath it.
Sparks popped.
The stench of burning rubber filled my senses.
‘Where the fuck are you, Naomi?’
The left side of the windscreen was shattered. On my side it was starred from where my forehead had impacted it. Only my seatbelt had halted me flying headlong through the glass. Naomi had unclipped her belt.
‘No!’ I had to find her before anyone else arrived.
The steering wheel pinned me. The engine compartment was shoved back, warping the dash. More sparks fizzed and crackled. I pulled and shoved, got out of my seat belt, and made a cursory check of the rear seat, but Naomi wasn’t there.
Naomi had been catapulted through the windscreen. At the realisation that she might have survived, I fought to get free of the steering column. The door’s structure had twisted, the window had exploded. And I tried to scramble from it. I wormed my upper body out the gap, but couldn’t free my right leg. My foot was caught under one of the misaligned pedals. I was desperate enough to rip off my leg, throwing my weight this way and that, and finally pulled free. Agony flared from my knee to my brain. I screamed. I fell on the road alongside my car, knowing I’d done myself serious damage, but there was nothing for it. I had to get to Naomi. I used the car for support, but fell twice. Both times I rose, and limped determinedly for the garden wall I’d smashed into.
It was no more than half a minute since I’d smashed into the wall, yet already neighbours were leaning out of their windows, or had come to front doors. They could spoil everything. Lights had come on in the bedrooms of the nearest house, illuminating Naomi’s crumpled form. For effect, I screamed at her as I scrambled over the partly collapsed wall, and fell among flowers and shrubs. I fought free, partly crawling across a previously well-tended lawn that was now littered with bloody glass, debris and shards of sandstone. My gaze never shifted from Naomi. I was relieved to see she was dead still. But I had to make sure.
It felt an eternity before I reached her, but as soon as I did I cradled her head in my lap, pushed her dress down to cover her exposed thighs. I stroked hair back off her features. It was clotted with her blood. Her face was unrecognisable, torn to pieces as she’d exploded through the window. I whispered her name.
Naomi stirred.
I mewled like a kicked dog.
‘Naomi, baby, I warned you.’ I touched her face, and she pulled away. ‘Naomi? Can you hear me? I fucking warned you what would happen.’
I checked behind me for observers. No one was near enough to clearly see us. I shifted my hand, placing my palm over her nostrils and mouth. Her body shuddered.
‘I have to do this, Naomi.’ Nobody could learn the truth behind the crash.
One of Naomi’s eyes slid open. It was unfocussed. The pupil was dilated, and moved rapidly around in a flicking motion. Blood pooled in the corner, barely watered down by the thick tear that oozed out. Using a thumb, I smoothed away the blood. My action was enough for Naomi to focus on, and I watched her pupil widen as she peered up at me and recognised me as her killer.
‘J…Jaaa…’ Her voice came as a wet sputter in her throat. ‘Jaaack!’
‘Yeah, it’s me, Jack. I promised what would happen if you tried to leave me….’
Bystanders had begun to gather. Some had even come into the garden. Not close enough to see my hand firmly clamped over her face, but that might change any second. I panicked.
‘Don’t just stand there,’ I screamed, all the while clamping my palm in place. ‘She’s choking! Go and call an ambulance, for God’s sake! Go on!’
A man ran over and crouched alongside me, his hand on my shoulder. I ignored him. All I could see was Naomi’s ruined face, her one open eye now centred on my face. The pupil was still, and the light had gone from her vision. I wiped at the blood around her mashed lips, as if attempting to clear her airways.
‘She’s gone, lad. Best you leave her alone now,’ the man said. ‘There’s an ambulance coming, they’ll look after her.’
‘Why didn’t you stop, Jack?’ Naomi’s words had a distant quality to them.
‘Shhh, don’t talk.’ I didn’t want the bystander to hear the truth behind the crash. Apparently he hadn’t. He looked down at us sadly, shook his head in resignation.
‘She’s gone, lad,’ he repeated.
Perhaps I’d only imagined her words, but I had to be sure.
I leaned over, as if embracing her, close enough to smother her. ‘Babe, everything’s going to be all right. An ambulance is coming. They’ll make you well again in no time.’ I kissed her gently on the forehead, tasting her blood. ‘Everything’s
going to be fine soon.’ It sounded like I comforted her, but really I reassured myself. Beneath my hands and lips she was inert. Dead.
‘Honest, Naomi, you’re going to be OK. I’m going to look after you,’ I went on for effect, crying, shameless in the face of the group of bystanders now gathered around us. ‘I’m going to keep you safe.’
I felt hands on my shoulders. Someone attempted to ease me away.
‘No! I’m not leaving her. She needs me!’ I jerked free, pushing back with an elbow. ‘I’m not leaving her!’
‘I’m not leaving you, Jack.’
Naomi’s voice was surprisingly clear. Fear clamped my throat in a vice-like grip. She was still alive?
‘No, Naomi, you can’t…’ No one else had responded to her.
Naomi was dead. I knew it. Yet she wasn’t prepared to let go. She wasn’t prepared to let me go.
‘Naomi,’ I cried. ‘I want you…I want you…’
My final words were for my ears only, but I trusted that her ghost would hear. ‘I want you to just die.’
33
Guilt of the Heart and Mind
It was a different set of memories I recalled than those I’d related during my statement to the police after the crash. I had been taken to hospital, and my torn knee joint had meant a night on a ward. The police had arrived then and I gave my first account of the accident, swearing that Naomi had flown off the handle during an argument, and had attacked me while I was driving. I told them she was threatening to leap from the moving car, and as I’d tried to stop her, I lost control. The scratches on my cheek were obviously made by fingernails and added some validity to the lie. I kept to the same statement when interviewed under caution at the police station a few days later. I was facing a “causing death by dangerous driving” charge, which carried a custodial sentence, but in the end I must have convinced the police officers that I was the hurt party and the accident was not my fault. There were some small bruises on Naomi’s face, but the pathologist responsible for her post mortem examination couldn’t separate them from the cuts and contusions sustained when she went through the windscreen. I walked away without charge. There were some questions raised during the subsequent inquest into Naomi’s death, but where there was doubt, I couldn’t be held responsible. The fact that Naomi had unclipped her seatbelt, and partially opened her door, supported my version of events and went in my favour.
When all came to all, I’d got away with murder.
But in my heart and mind, I knew I was guilty.
It played on me, and at the young age of twenty-four I had my first nervous breakdown. I spent some weeks enjoying the hospitality of the local mental health facility. Sometimes people block out the trauma that afflicted them so badly, as I did. When I finally returned home to my parents’ house, I believed the bogus tale concerning Naomi’s death as much as everyone else did. I met Catriona and moved on. A fresh relationship, marriage, and the births of two children helped keep my mind off my guilt for a number of years.
But now, as I sat feeling despondent in my haunted bachelor pad, I began dredging up more recent memories. I’m not sure what the spark was that had ignited my earlier memories, but I began to dwell on what had really happened to Naomi. Secretly I began visiting her gravesite, where I’d talk to her in the hope that I would receive a reply. I can accept now that I was seeking absolution of my sins, and the only one who could offer forgiveness was Naomi herself. My deceased girlfriend never replied, or if she did I wasn’t ready to hear her. My need for peace of mind led to obsession, and I ended up spending more time at Naomi’s grave than I did at home, or at work. I lost my job – back then I was actually a TEFL teacher, imparting my knowledge of the English language to the Eastern European immigrants flooding into Carlisle - and things grew strained between Catriona and me. It didn’t help that – more than once – I called her Naomi during our arguments, and even once during sex. A second nervous breakdown struck me and I was again held in a secure mental health facility. I trust now that it was my doctors who convinced me that my belief in ghosts was nonsense, or that the certainty that I must make contact with my dead girlfriend was squashed under the fog of medication, because when I was finally kicked loose I was a staunch sceptic. To me ghosts weren’t real. There was no afterlife. Dead meant dead. Ergo I didn’t have to seek forgiveness from a dead girl. I was happy to absolve myself of all shame.
If things had been left at that then everything might have turned out well: instead I arrived home to find my wife and my best friend in bed together. I walked away. The trouble was I was once more found at Naomi’s graveside crying “I want you, I want you” - it was a short hop from there back to the secure ward at the nut house, and another round of powerful drugs.
It was only a few months ago since I was discharged. My parents took me in at first, but I wanted my independence back. It wasn’t a teaching job, I could no longer get the necessary clearance to work with students, but I found the job at the bathroom showroom, which despite being less than aspirational brought in a steady income, and I settled back into normality. I found myself a new home and a new girlfriend. Jesus, my first visit to this decrepit old house had been enough to set my feet once more on the rocky road to downfall.
Finding the empty medicine box, I studied it again. It had obviously held the drugs necessary to suppress my mental illness. When I’d last finished my course of meds, I hadn’t ordered a fresh prescription, or if I had I’d promptly forgotten all about collecting them. That or I’d buried my memories of my illness the way I’d previously buried not just a murder but also my subsequent breakdowns and incarceration in mental health units.
I should make an appointment with my GP, I told myself.
In a sudden fit of anger I threw the box across the room. I was all right; I remembered everything now and I was still in control. I didn’t need any fucking drugs to keep me sane. My irrational behaviour earlier had been through Catriona’s mistreatment of me. Hell, if she’d opened the door as I asked we’d have had a civil conversation, and she could have helped me gain the answers I required without me having to go through this turmoil. But no. She’d chosen to lock me out, and then Mark thought himself the big hard man who was going to see me off. That clown thought he could throw me off my own frigging property, did he? Well he wasn’t man enough, and Catriona knew it. So they got me arrested, the bastards!
I just bet that they were having a good laugh at my expense. “Poor crazy, Jack! Hardy-fucking-har-har! Now it’s off to bed we go to celebrate ridding ourselves of that burr in our hides.”
‘Yeah, well, we’ll just see about that!’
It didn’t occur to me that my phone had been on the blink earlier, but now it was working fine. I took it out and phoned for a taxi. I waited on the front street for it to arrive, but lost patience and set off on foot, striding out. It probably took me twenty minutes to walk to Catriona’s house. It was mid-afternoon. The kids wouldn’t yet be home from school, which suited me. Mark’s car was still on my drive. My Volvo was sitting on the roadside. I wouldn’t put it past Mark to puncture my tyres for badness, but a quick check over told me I’d beaten him to the idea. I unlocked my car and took from the glove compartment a Philips screwdriver and returned to my drive. It was getting on to an early winter’s evening, but it hadn’t begun to grow dark yet and the lights in the house were off. The windows reflected the street outside, and I couldn’t tell if I was observed or not. I didn’t really care.
Hunkering down, I drove the screwdriver into the nearest tyre, stabbing in near the rim so that the tyre couldn’t be repaired. The car dipped as the tyre deflated slowly. I made my way around the car at a squat, repeating the process until the car had settled on all four rims. I was still sitting there, listening to the last satisfying hiss of deflating tyres when the first snowflakes adhered to my hair. I touched one of the flakes, lifting it from my scalp on my fingertip. I studied the snowflake as it melted. When it was a tiny puddle of moisture I stood. I wasn�
��t done yet.
With a flurry of white swirling around me, I walked the length of Mark’s car, dragging the tip of the screwdriver along the paintwork. Then I dragged it over the bonnet a couple of times for good measure. Only then did I return to my Volvo and get inside.
The air was frigid in the car. Condensation had built on the inner side of the windscreen, while fresh snow piled on the outer. I turned on the engine, set the blowers to demist, and waited. I watched my old house, hoping that Mark would come out and discover his vandalised car before I left. It would give me great satisfaction to see the look of defeat on his face. More snow piled up and I hit the wiper switch. The wipers made clear arches in the snow. Melt trickled on the window. It made me think of how transient a form a snowflake was. How easily it was transformed from one form of energy to another. The snowflake died and in its place existed a droplet of water. The droplet would sooner or later be absorbed back into the atmosphere, to again perhaps form into a snowflake to fall again and go through the same transformation. Death follows life follows death…on and on, eternally. It was probably metaphorical if I thought harder about it.
In the end I must have seen sense. It wasn’t a good idea to hang around until Mark found the damage to his car. He’d have the cops on to me in an instant, and this time I’d committed a punishable offence. I drove away, fiddling with my phone. I called Sarah at work. Fuck Daniel and his rules against taking private calls in work time.
34
An Effigy of Straw
‘I’m not sure this was such a good idea,’ said Sarah as I let her in the front door of my house. She was swaddled against the snow in a parka with a fur lining, a knitted hat pulled over her hair. The snow was still falling, and had already laid down a good three inches or more. Snowflakes stuck to the wool fibres of her hat and on the shoulders of her parka. Her café au lait skin was more milk than usual. She stamped her boots on the hall floor – I’d yet to buy a welcome mat. I could smell tobacco smoke on her breath as she moved past me with not as much as a peck on the cheek.