Khaos

by Louise Manson

  ‘I don’t need Mark,’ Carmen continued, ignoring the insult. ‘I’ve got my new boyfriends, Jack Daniels and Captain Morgan!’

  ‘Yes, I can tell you’ve spent the whole night with them, like you always do with men you’ve just met,’ said Marla dryly.

  ‘Marly! Be nice to me.’

  ‘You broke the window!’

  ‘We’ll you’ve changed the locks! I tried my keys, they don’t work!’

  ‘Well, don’t you know how to knock? Or pick up a phone to let me know you’re coming?’

  ‘You know what your problem is Marla?’ Carmen stated, pointing at her sister dramatically. ‘You don’t know how to be spontaneous.’

  ‘And your problem is, you turn to drinking and vandalism when you’re having a hard time.’

  ‘Come on sis. Have a heart.’

  ‘What did you come here for?’

  ‘Let me sleep here please? I will be quiet, you won’t even now I’m here.’

  ‘Hmmm. I don’t know…’

  ‘Please. Pretty please?’ Carmen clasped her hands together melodramatically.

  ‘Oh, Ok. Just tonight,’ said Marla reluctantly.

  ‘Thank you Sis. I love you!’ Carmen bear-hugged Marla, who was as unbending as ever.

  ‘Get off! You’re filthy and you smell like vomit! Go to bed!’ Marla shrugged away from Carmen and stomped off. Loka reluctantly helped Khaos get Carmen to her room, rolling her eyes in annoyance the whole time. They sat her on her bed and she flopped over harmlessly into the clean sheets. Khaos looked at her again for a moment, wondering if she would be all right alone.

  ‘Are you coming?’ said Loka from the doorway, gazing at Khaos strangely.

  Khaos checked herself and followed Loka out of the room, turning the lights off after her.

  Detective Heel stared through the one-way glass thoughtfully, observing the nervous couple waiting in the interrogation room on the other side. Both white, probably mid thirties, very well to do, judging by his shirt and tie and her floral summer dress. They weren’t quite what Heel was expecting. They didn’t look like terrorists. Or religious zealots. But then again, you could never tell, with some people. And Heel doubted that terrorist religious zealots would just stroll into a police station confessing they had a child in their care that had been reported missing. Heel thought again of her onion metaphor. Had she even got below the first layer yet? And where do these people fit in?

  ‘Ok. I’m ready.’ She opened the door, her file under one arm. The couple stood up when they saw her coming.

  ‘Hi, my name is Detective Inspector Heel, sorry to keep you waiting.’ She offered her hand, trying to sound pleasant, but all the while she scrutinized them, trying to work them out.

  ‘Please sit.’ She gestured back toward the cold little table and the chairs. They all sat together and Detective Heel set up her file leisurely, letting them sweat a little. ‘Do you mind if I record this?’

  ‘No, not at all,’ the man replied.

  Heel allowed them a small, encouraging smile. She produced a small dictaphone from her pocket and pushed down the record button. ‘This is Detective Inspector Heel, interview with keepers of missing child baby A, April twenty sixth, two-thousand and twelve. Can you state your names for the record, please?’

  ‘Sean Edwards.’

  ‘Cheryl Edwards.’

  ‘Good,’ Heel made a note in her file. ‘Now the statement you made to the officers on duty this morning, state that on the fourteenth of this month, twelve days ago, in fact, you were walking down Kingswood road toward your home, when out of the blue, someone - a woman you did not recognize - walked up to you and gave you baby A. You do not have any connection to the parents, nor do you even know who they are, is that right?’

  ‘That’s correct,’ replied the man tentatively.

  ‘And it took you twelve days to report this to the authorities?’

  ‘The woman told us to take care of her. We haven’t got any children you see…’

  ‘So you think it’s perfectly okay to just keep a baby, a child who could be anyone’s, because some unknown woman gave her to you in the street?’

  They nodded, their eyes to the floor.

  ‘Nothing about that struck you as unusual?’ Heel pressed.

  ‘We could see the apartment fire, from the street,’ replied Sean. ‘The ambulance and firemen were everywhere. The woman was covered in ash, so we thought she had rescued her from the fire, and was entrusting us with her care.’

  ‘Did you not think anyone might be looking for the child?’

  ‘Well, yes but…’ He faltered.

  ‘We were planning to report the incident. We just, well, we thought someone would contact us.’

  ‘I have a report from the local borough adoption and fostering association. On April sixteenth, two days after the incident, you were in their office making enquiries about legal adoption of the child, and had the child with you.’ She looked at them pointedly.

  ‘We thought that was the right way to go about it.’

  ‘Trying to get custody of the child, before you’ve reported it to the police?’

  ‘We thought it… We…’

  ‘Let me just, read this back, okay? Because I feel like we are on different planets here.’ Heel shuffled her notes, mostly for effect. ‘A woman walks up to you on the street, hands you a baby, and tells you to take care of her. She then disappears. And you have never seen either woman or baby before in your lives, am I right?’

  ‘Yes,’ the couple said quietly in unison.

  ‘Right. But instead of questioning the woman, or trying to find out who the baby is or where she came from, you just decide to keep her?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You didn’t think, “oh, this baby might be stolen”, or,” someone might be missing a child”, since she’s not yours?’

  ‘We didn’t steal her, all right!’ Cheryl blurted, unable to take the grilling anymore. Sean tried to quiet her, but she pushed him away. ‘We didn’t steal her! That’s what you’re trying to say, isn’t it?!’

  ‘Well, you have to admit, the evidence…’

  ‘You don’t know us! We would never do anything like this! We would never steal a child!’

  ‘But you didn’t report it to the police. So that makes you pretty suspicious to us.’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ Sean began, trying to explain. ‘We have been married for four years now, and have been trying for a baby since our honeymoon! We’ve tried everything, nothing works.’

  ‘I’ve had IVF three times!’ the woman blurted.

  ‘Cheryl has always wanted to be a mother. And we are so ready, we’ve got a baby room all set up, we know a good nursery, good schools... All of our friends have at least two children by now…’

  ‘That’s all very well, but where are you going with this?’

  ‘We are getting to that, Detective. We are trying to explain why we didn’t report the incident to you immediately, which we know was stupid, we realize that, but we intended nothing malicious. We would never take someone’s child away from them.’

  ‘We prayed, Detective,’ the woman whispered through tears of anguish.

  ‘Prayed?’

  ‘You know, to God? We prayed for a baby, so hard, every night for the past four years. Do you know how frustrating that is? To be ignored by the so-called Heavenly Father?’

  ‘After the last IVF treatment failed,’ Sean continued, ‘Cheryl was in a state of utter despair. We were both in such a black hole of emptiness. We really felt like we were being punished.’

  ‘Then that night, when that woman put the baby into my arms…’

  ‘We just… we knew… it was an answer to our prayers. A gift from God.’

  ‘Like the child that was given to Abraham’s wife, in the Bible, when she was sure she couldn’t conceive,’ Cheryl said dreamily.

  Oh God, Heel thought to herself. Here we go. She’d had a feeling they were that way inclined. RELIGION. The bi
g word popped into her head again. It made perfectly normal people do insane things, convinced they are doing the bidding of God. Bizarre.

  ‘Right,’ she continued, keeping her thoughts to herself. ‘So you thought it would all be okay, because God answered your prayers?’

  ‘Well, yes. We know now that we still should have reported it, but…’

  ‘We thought that she would be taken away from us!’

  ‘Well, she isn’t your baby, divine intervention or not,’ said Heel flatly.

  ‘But God brought her to us…’

  ‘So, the mystery woman is God now?’

  ‘No, but… There was something about her…’

  ‘We just knew it was all right. Maybe she was a messenger or something.’

  ‘Hmm…’ Heel checked her notes, reading over the statements the couple had made. Her heart skipped a beat, as it had done when she first read the description of the woman; she sounded all too familiar. ‘Tell me more about her then, because all you’ve said is that she was about five seven or eight, any age between twenty and thirty, long dark hair, olive-skinned or possibly part Afro-Caribbean, but you’re not sure as the street was dark…’ She looked at them imploringly. ‘It isn’t a lot to go on. What colour were her eyes? What was she wearing?’

  ‘We… We don’t know,’ replied Sean.

  ‘You don’t know? Not even what she was wearing?’

  ‘We told you, it was dark.’ They both stared at the floor again.

  ‘I think there’s something you’re not telling me here.’ She stared from one to the other, unblinking. This technique usually worked.

  ‘We’ve told you everything.’

  ‘No, not everything. Everyone can remember what a criminal or victim was wearing, at least. Something is missing from the story.’

  ‘We should just…!’ Cheryl began to blurt again, but Sean interrupted.

  ‘Cheryl! No! We can’t…’

  ‘What? What is it?’ said Heel, feeling excitement in her heart at this new prospect. A significant piece of the puzzle was going to be revealed to her, she was sure. ‘You ought to tell me. You could be held in contempt of the law for withholding information.’

  Sean gulped. ‘We didn’t want to mention, well, what, what we saw…’

  ‘What we thought we saw,’ Cheryl corrected.

  ‘What did you see?’

  ‘The woman, when she walked up to us, out of the shadows… She… She didn’t seem right.’

  ‘Her face…was… strange.’

  ‘This is going to sound insane, Detective.’

  More insane than keeping a baby that doesn’t belong to you?! ‘Try me,’ she encouraged as calmly as possible.

  ‘Her eyes… They were grey.’

  ‘The irises?’ Heel’s heart skipped a beat once more. Hadn’t the coma girl’s eyes been a grey colour?

  ‘No, the whole… the whole eyeball. They were grey. Like… Like…’

  ‘Rainclouds,’ Cheryl finished.

  ‘Yes, like rainclouds. And she was wearing some sort of, well, like a sort of armour…’

  ‘It looked old. We couldn’t really make it out.’

  ‘Yes, and… She had…’ Cheryl hesitated, her forehead furrowed. ‘She had what looked like, well, wings, Detective.’

  ‘Wings… On her back?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Wings… Like an angel?’

  ‘This was no angel,’ Cheryl shuddered. ‘More like the opposite of an angel.’

  ‘But, she wasn’t bad,’ Sean continued. ‘We could tell, there was something about her that was, well, good.’

  ‘That’s why we were sure that the baby was meant to be ours.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Heel mulled over this revelation. Again, not the answers she had been hoping for. Just what was going on here? Wings? Come on. The baby was rescued from the fire by a winged vigilante? But if it was the coma girl, and she was the terrorist, then why would she go to the trouble of finding this couple and making sure the baby was alright? Terrorists wouldn’t care about a child, would they? But this couple didn’t seem to be lying. ‘I think I’ve heard enough.’

  ‘What’s going to happen to us?’

  ‘Nothing, at the moment. You haven’t been charged with anything.’

  ‘So we are free to go?’

  ‘What about our baby? Is she going to be taken away from us?’ asked Cheryl shakily.

  ‘That I cannot say.’

  ‘Oh please…’ Cheryl began.

  ‘It’s not my department. You’ll have to take it up with Child Protection.’

  The couple began to cry as they got up to leave, cuddling each other and sobbing softly. Heel felt a twinge of sympathy for them, and felt compelled to give them some encouragement.

  ‘Her mother is dead. And no other family members have come forward to claim her. I can’t promise anything, but you might be able to… I mean, I can’t guarantee it, but, I can try. It might work out alright in the end. You might get to keep her.’

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  That night, Khaos slept reasonably well for the first time, though she still woke early. Once she had washed and dressed, she found Loka in the security room, watching the screens leisurely.

  ‘The Mistress and Miss Carmen would like you to join them for breakfast,’ said Loka, without looking up. ‘Follow me please.’

  In the Japanese garden a large round table had been laid with a varied spread of breakfast foods, ranging from fresh whole fruits such as apples and bananas, and cut up bowls of pineapple and melon, to a basket of croissants and other pastries, fresh toast in a rack, boiled eggs, and several tureens containing bacon and sausage and tomatoes. Carmen sat on the right, last night’s makeup and ruined outfit gone, replaced with an oversized, white towel bathrobe. She was enthusiastically gobbling a full English breakfast. On the other side sat Marla, in one of her Japanese wrap arounds, carefully peeling a boiled egg. Both girls, despite it being very early in the morning, had full faces of makeup and their hair was curled and styled beautifully. It was strange, but with Carmen sitting there, so cheerfully, it seemed to take away all Marla’s severity.

  ‘You’ll get fat, eating all that,’ said Marla to Carmen, with disdain.

  ‘Mmm, grease,’ replied Carmen, slurping on purpose. Then she noticed Khaos and Loka approaching, and her pretty coppery eyes lit up. ‘Morning!’ She got to her feet, abandoning her breakfast. ‘You’re the one I was sick on last night, aren’t you? I’m so sorry.’

  ‘It’s fine, it’s nothing,’ said Khaos.

  ‘Are your clothes ruined? I will replace them, I promise… Err… Do you know, I forgot to ask your name last night! How rude of me!’

  ‘That’s ok, Its Cam,’ said Khaos, remembering to use her alias.

  ‘Cam! Nice to meet you! I’m Carmen. You must think I’m a terrible person, being sick on you and not even introducing myself.’

  ‘Well, she wouldn’t be wrong there,’ Marla muttered, pursing her lips.

  ‘Marla! Shut up!’ Carmen shoved Marla’s arm playfully. ‘Be gentle with me, I have a hangover.’ She clutched at her head theatrically.

  ‘Cam, Loka, please sit, join us,’ invited Marla, waving toward two other free seats. ‘Cam is my new bodyguard, Carmen, replacing Russell.’ Marla explained, not responding to Carmen’s playful shoving. ‘You remember Russell?’

  ‘Russell! Was he the hot one?’

  ‘Uh, I suppose you might think he was hot. Not quite up to my standards though.’

  ‘Who is!’ joked Carmen. ‘Whatever happened to Tom, by the way? You never talk about him.’

  Marla’s expression darkened. ‘He moved to L. A. remember? For work.’

  ‘Oh yeah, sure. “Work”. That’s what they all say.’

  Marla shot her an angry look. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Well you know, Marly, you don’t have that much luck with guys, do you? They always end up jumping ship.’

  ‘Tom was offered a great job over th
ere,’ Marla muttered through gritted teeth, clearly uncomfortable with this topic. ‘I can’t exactly stand in his way, can I?’

  ‘Well, why don’t you go over there with him?’

  ‘I just can’t, ok?’

  ‘But you were good together…’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about him anymore,’ Marla said sullenly.

  ‘Fine. Forget it. Anyway, Cam, why don’t you eat something? There’s plenty to eat! You’ll have to help me eat it, Marla hardly nibbles anything.’

  ‘I eat! Just not like a pig, like you,’ Marla retorted, not entirely joking.

  ‘She doesn’t. She pretends to eat, but nothing actually goes in her mouth. She’s been working on that egg for about an hour now.’

  ‘I have to make sure there’s no eggshell on it, alright?’

  ‘Or maybe, you’re an anal retentive!’

  ‘I’m not anal. I’m cautious. Not like you, getting drunk out of your mind with god knows who, turning up at the house in that state, smashing a window…’

  ‘I said I’m sorry about that! Besides, I’m upset,’ she glanced hopefully at her mobile phone, which was lying on the table. It remained silent. ‘Where’s Mark? He should be on the phone apologising by now!’

  ‘Maybe it’s really over,’ suggested Marla, barely disguising the hope in her voice.

  ‘No way. Mark would do anything for me.’

  ‘Maybe he’s had enough of you?’

  ‘I don’t drive men away like you do!’ Carmen snapped.

  ‘I do not!’

  ‘You do! You’re overbearing.’

  ‘Shut up.’ Marla became defensive again.

  ‘You try to control everything.’

  ‘Shut up!’ Marla snarled, getting to her feet angrily. ‘I’m not hungry anymore.’ Without another word, she stormed back toward the house. Loka got up and followed just behind, glaring back at Carmen and Khaos.

  ‘Tough love, Marly! It’s called tough love!’ Carmen shouted after her.

  ‘I don’t think she wanted to talk about her ex-boyfriend,’ said Khaos.

  ‘Do you think I shouldn’t have said that?’ Carmen frowned, her pretty forehead knotted with worry. ‘Maybe not. But I didn’t mean to be hurtful. I want her to be happy, that’s all. But it’s always the same with her, Cam, she gets a nice boyfriend, he tries to meet her demands for a couple of weeks, and then he gives up because she’s too high maintenance. She tries to control them, always wanting to know where they are and what they’re doing and who with. She gets so jealous! So she ruins it for herself every time.’ Carmen sighed. ‘Anyway, she probably wouldn’t like me talking about it with you.’