Bleed For Me (joseph o'loughlin)

by Michael Robotham

  The controller looks past me at the young woman. ‘Five minutes, love.’ His gaze lingers on her short skirt and her rangy legs. I can almost smell his torpid lust.

  Finally, he turns to me and we reciprocally decide to hate each other.

  ‘I’m looking for this girl. You might have seen her a couple of weeks ago. Tuesday, late afternoon.’

  I slide the photograph through a gap in the glass security screen. The controller holds the photograph up to the light like he’s looking at a high-denomination banknote.

  ‘Who is she?’

  ‘A friend of mine. I’m trying to help her.’

  ‘A friend? How are you trying to help her?’

  ‘She’s in trouble. Have you seen her?’

  I want to take the photograph back. I don’t want him touching it.

  ‘Can’t say I have,’ he wheezes. ‘But if you leave it with me I’ll ask some of the drivers.’ He pushes a scrap of paper towards me. ‘Jot down your name and number. I’ll call you if I come up with anything.

  ‘I can’t leave it with you. I don’t have any more photos of her.’

  The obese controller has unfolded the strip of shots and now he’s studying the pictures of Charlie and Sienna together. He runs his thumb over Charlie’s face.

  ‘So who’s this other girlie?’

  ‘Nobody important.’

  A smile extends across his face. ‘I’m sure that she thinks she’s important.’

  ‘Just give it back to me.’

  Again that same predatory leer. Pinching the strip of photographs between his thumb and forefinger, he extends his arm towards me. I have to tug it once, twice, three times before he lets it go.

  A car pulls up outside, the engine running.

  ‘That’s your car, love,’ says the controller.

  The woman rises and straightens a skirt beneath her coat, checking out her reflection in the darkened front window. I hold the door open for her but she doesn’t acknowledge me. It’s as though she’s trying hard not to be noticed despite how she’s dressed.

  The minicab driver gets out of the car and opens the door for her. He’s wearing jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt with a slogan on the back: ‘Happy Hour - Half-Price Sex’.

  When he turns I can see his pale, narrow face and the tattoos running down his cheeks like black tears dripping from his chemical green eyes. It’s the same man I saw standing outside the restaurant when I had lunch with Julianne.

  The minicab controller interrupts my thoughts. ‘He’s got a photograph. He’s looking for a girl.’

  The driver doesn’t answer, but takes a step towards me. Every instinct tells me not to show him Sienna’s photograph, but he takes it from me, cocking his head to one side and studying the image as though committing her face, her hair, her budding body to memory.

  Then slowly he raises his face to mine. I can smell his aftershave and something else, lurking beneath.

  ‘What’s this girl to you?’

  ‘It’s not important.’

  ‘Really? Try me.’

  ‘No, that’s OK.’

  I reach out for the photograph.

  ‘Maybe you should leave this with us,’ he says. ‘I’ll keep an eye out for her.’

  As he says the words, he raises two fingers to his face and traces the dripping tattoos down each cheek, dragging his flesh out of shape. Something inside me shudders.

  ‘Forget I asked,’ I say. ‘I’m sorry to bother you.’

  ‘No bother. What’s your name?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Yeah, it does. You should leave your name and number - in case she turns up.’

  He’s in front of me now. What is that smell? Reaching out, I take the strip of photographs from his fingers, not wanting to touch him. Lowering my gaze, I step around him and keep walking, not looking back. I don’t want to think about this man. I don’t want to know his name or where he lives or what he’s done.

  The minicab pulls away from the kerb and accelerates along the street past me, carrying the sad-eyed girl and the crying man. As I watch the car turn the corner, voice inside my head is whispering that I’ve been wrong. This is bigger and darker and more complex than I imagined.

  23

  Annie Robinson opens the door. She’s wearing a yellow dress and her hair is pinned up in a messy, casual way that probably took her an hour to achieve. I feel the coolness of her lips on mine and can almost taste the brightness of her lipstick.

  ‘You came.’

  ‘What did you expect?’

  ‘I just thought you might find an excuse.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I can be rather pushy. I wasn’t always, but when you’re pushing forty and you’re a notch below Bambi in the beauty stakes, you either grab your chances or languish in boredom listening to your girlfriends talk about Botox injections or their latest diet.’

  Her voice tails off. She pours me a glass of wine. Her glass is almost empty. She refills it.

  ‘When I get nervous I talk too much - I’m doing it already.’

  ‘You’re being charming.’

  ‘I should just be indifferent. Men find indifference sexy.’

  Annie looks at me for confirmation, but I don’t know how to answer her.

  ‘It’s true,’ she says. ‘Why do twenty-five men in a bar always chat up the single prettiest woman when the odds of success are so poor and she’s probably not going to want to go home with any of them? Meanwhile every other single woman in the bar is wondering what they have to do to get some attention.’

  Annie lives in a listed Georgian terrace converted into six flats and backing on to the old Kent and Avon Canal in Bath. Her flat is on the ground floor and has a walled garden with trellises and a small patio dotted with terracotta pots.

  After giving me a tour of the garden, she points to the sofa and we sit, sipping wine. In the next breath she puts her arms around my neck and pushes her stomach against my thigh, kissing me urgently, wetly. Next thing she’s pressing my hand between her thighs, grinding her crotch against my knuckles and I’m reacting like a man dying of thirst who has crawled a hundred miles across a desert just to be here.

  The kiss continues as Annie pulls me up. Standing and kicking off her shoes, she edges me towards the bedroom. Breathlessly, we topple backwards on to her bed and she lands on top of me with a grunt.

  ‘Ow!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your elbow.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  Annie slips her fingers beneath the elastic of her knickers, pushing them over her thighs. I try to negotiate the zipper of her dress.

  ‘My hair! It’s caught! Don’t move.’

  She sits up on my thighs, reaching behind her to loosen the zip.

  ‘It’s jammed.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  She laughs. ‘We’re hopeless.’

  ‘It looks a lot easier in the movies.’

  ‘Maybe we should start again.’

  ‘I’ll just use your bathroom.’

  Rolling off the bed, I escape for a moment, feeling the cold tiles through my socks. The bathroom is nicely renovated, with a wall-to-ceiling mirror. There are shelves of shampoos, pastes, powders and moisturisers, which she appears to be stockpiling.

  I study myself in the mirror. My mouth is smudged with her lipstick. How long has it been? Two years without sex: more of a drought than a dry spell. I’ve crossed the Sahara. I’ve forgotten how to drink.

  She’ll be under the covers now, waiting for me, which is depressing rather than exciting. I look at my penis and wish it were bigger. I wish it would boss me around more often and stop me rationalising things.

  I’m not a perfect human being. I know more about feelings than I do about the physical world. It’s easier for me to understand passion than to experience it.

  Annie has brought another bottle of wine and glasses to the bedroom. She’s also wearing lingerie, lying self-consciously, trying to show herself to best effect. I
take off my clothes and lie down next to her. She doesn’t let my doubts linger, taking my hand and pulling me next to her. Her tongue moves against my teeth.

  Then she straddles me, squeezing me between her thighs, her breasts against my chest. I run my hand down her back and trace a finger over her curves. She lifts her hips, wanting me to touch her, but I glide my finger away moving higher and then drifting lower again.

  ‘Don’t tease me,’ she whispers, her voice vibrating.

  I let my fingers sweep across her mound and she traps my hand beneath her, grinding her pelvis against my knuckles. Her lips are pressed to my ear, whispering what she wants.

  I feel a familiar stirring. You don’t forget. It’s like falling off a bike or falling off a cliff or falling for someone. Even so, my lack of practice is quickly apparent. And I mean quickly.

  Annie doesn’t mind. We have all night, she says. The next time is slower, more deliberate, less urgent, better, and for just a moment all the loneliness and thoughts of Julianne leave my memory and the only sound in the room is the squeak of bedsprings under our weight and the gentle slap of Annie’s stomach against mine. I cry out involuntarily, more like a woman than a man, lost in the smell of her hair and the beating of her heart.

  I leave Annie sleeping, breathing softly. All men hope to do that. She looks like a child curled up in the disordered bed, one arm covering her eyes. There is a tiny mole on her shoulder blade; her upper lip more prominent than the lower; her eyebrows are shaped; she makes a soft humming noise as she sleeps and the soft swell of her stomach is strikingly feminine.

  Creeping through the house, dressing quietly, I let myself out. It’s an odd feeling, having slept with someone other than Julianne, to have touched and tasted another human being. I don’t know what I feel. Relief. Guilt. Happiness. Loss.

  I still have Julianne’s car. Her travelling make-up bag is in the pocket of the door and I imagine I can almost smell her shampoo on the headrest.

  In between the sex, Annie had told me about her divorce and how her husband and his lawyer had stitched her up, crying poor and hiding assets.

  ‘I was married for six years and four months and couldn’t get pregnant,’ she told me. ‘We tried. My husband had an affair with his secretary, which sounds so boring when I say it - like a cliché. That’s my life - a cliché.’

  ‘I’m sure that’s not true,’ I said.

  I wanted to ask her about Gordon Ellis. Annie knew about Ray Hegarty’s allegations. She conducted the internal investigation, yet she didn’t react when I mentioned Gordon and Sienna. Was it natural caution, or confidentiality, or was she protecting a colleague?

  Another bottle of wine was opened. Annie drank most of it. She apologised for being so maudlin. ‘I don’t know why I’m telling you all this, spilling my secrets.’

  ‘You don’t have to explain.’

  ‘Really? Are you sure?’

  I wasn’t sure but I said yes and Annie continued, wanting to tell me everything; to share her secrets, funny stories and her bad decisions. It should have been intimate. It felt more like a therapy session.

  I once had a patient who believed that the clock ran faster for her than anyone else. She was a university student and she was convinced that her exam time was concertinaed and that ‘her clock’ would speed up, giving her less time, which is why she could never finish.

  The same clock ran slower for other people, she said. Annie acted like that. The world had conspired against her and she wanted me to know that it wasn’t her fault.

  24

  The flight from Bristol Airport to Edinburgh takes just over an hour and I’m on the ground before 8 a.m. Ruiz is waiting for me in the lounge, leafing through the pages of the Scotsman.

  ‘Do you think if I got enough people to vote we could get London declared part of Scotland?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, the Scots get more of our taxes than anyone else. They’ve got better health care, free prescriptions and no student fees. I could be a Jock, as long as I didn’t have to eat sheep’s guts and support the Scottish rugby team.’

  ‘They are pretty terrible.’

  ‘Total rubbish.’

  He tosses the paper on a seat. ‘Come on.’

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Breakfast. I’m famished. I ate Chinese last night - gave me thunderous wind. Not even the Scots can fuck up breakfast.’

  Ruiz leads me to his hire car. Something small and compact. He continues to spout his theories on Scottish devolution as we pull into the morning traffic and head towards Edinburgh. The sunrise is pink and misty, leaving tentacles of fog clinging to the valleys where church spires seem to float like islands in rivers of white.

  Parking near the old city walls, Ruiz leads me through a maze of alleys until we reach the Royal Mile. The buildings are made of slate-grey stone and look as though they’ve risen directly from the earth.

  It’s twenty years since I’ve been to Edinburgh. Julianne and I came up for the ‘Fringe’ with a crowd of university friends. We camped in tents and it rained for a week, but we filled our boots with satire and comedy.

  Ruiz chooses a café, which looks positively medieval. Most of the patrons are tourists carrying video cameras and city guides. Taking a table near the window, he orders a full breakfast with extra sausages, toast and a pot of tea.

  ‘Do you know what that stuff does to your arteries?’ I ask him.

  ‘Do you have a chart? I love charts.’

  The waitress is a big-boned Polish girl with bleached hair and a nose-stud. I order the poached eggs on sourdough toast on her recommendation. Ruiz looks at me as though I’ve asked to be castrated.

  Once she’s gone, he takes out his battered notebook and rests it on the table.

  ‘Hey, you want to hear a Scottish joke?’

  ‘Maybe you should avoid Scottish jokes.’

  ‘Nonsense. The Jocks have a great sense of humour. Look at Gordon Brown.’

  The tea arrives and he opens the silver pot and jiggles the bag impatiently. Then he unhooks the rubber band holding his notebook together.

  ‘You want to ask the questions?’

  ‘No, you talk.’

  He starts with Ray Hegarty. His security business was solvent, the tax returns up to date, with no major debts or lawsuits. Ray was the public face of the company, a bona fide hero, decorated for bravery after he rescued two children from a flooded stormwater drain.

  His son, Lance, left school at sixteen, signed to play football for Burnleigh. A knee injury ended his career before he turned eighteen. Initially, Lance tried to find work as an assistant coach, but then he trained as a motorcycle mechanic.

  ‘The kid has had some problems. Two years ago he was arrested and deported from Croatia with twenty other hooligans after England played a World Cup qualifier. He also has convictions for racially aggravated assault and low-range drink driving.’

  Breakfast is served. Ruiz tucks a paper napkin in the collar of his shirt and scoops baked beans on to a corner of toast.

  ‘I came up with nothing on Danny Gardiner. Kid’s clean.’

  ‘You still haven’t told me what I’m doing here.’

  Ruiz gives me a wry smile. ‘You were right about the school teacher.’

  ‘Gordon Ellis?’

  ‘Yeah, but he wasn’t always called Ellis. He used to be Gordon Freeman, but three years ago he took his mother’s surname and became Gordon Ellis.’

  ‘Is that important?’

  ‘It helps if you’re running away from something.’

  Ruiz is going to tell me the story in his own time. He slurps a mouthful of tea and dabs his lips with a napkin.

  ‘What do you know about his wife?’

  ‘Natasha?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Ellis said they met at school. Childhood sweethearts.’

  ‘Well, he wasn’t lying.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Natasha’s maiden name is Stewart. She was thirteen
when Gordon Ellis started teaching at Sorell College. It’s a private girls’ school here in Edinburgh.’

  ‘She was his student?’

  ‘Music and drama. I put in a call to the headmaster and set off a dozen alarm bells. Twenty minutes later I had a plummy-voiced solicitor on the phone telling me to ever so politely fuck off.

  ‘According to her school yearbook, Natasha left in year nine Gordon Ellis transferred a year later. She claimed to be nineteen when they married, but her proper birth certificate puts her at three years younger than that.’

  ‘How old is she now?’

  ‘Officially, she’s just turned eighteen.’

  ‘Maybe they hooked up after they both left the school,’ I say.

  ‘OK, but why lie about Natasha’s age on their marriage certificate? ’

  I think back to my meeting with Natasha outside the school. She was picking up Billy, who is Emma’s age.

  ‘But she has a son?’ I say.

  ‘Not her boy,’ replies Ruiz. ‘That’s where it gets really interesting. ’

  Wiping his plate clean with a half-slice of toast, he consumes it in two mouthfuls and finishes his tea. Then he pulls fifteen quid from his wallet. Leaves it on the table.

  ‘You still haven’t told me what I’m doing here.’

  ‘We’re meeting a family. They’re called the Regans. They don’t live far.’

  ‘Why am I meeting the Regans?’

  ‘They have a daughter, Carolinda, who was married to Gordon Ellis.’

  ‘He’s been married before?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Divorced?’

  ‘Not exactly.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘According to Gordon Ellis, Caro packed her suitcase and took off. Happens all the time. Some people don’t like waking up every morning and seeing the same old face on the other pillow, day in, day out. Depresses the shit out of them.’

  ‘You’re such a romantic. So why did she walk out?’

  ‘She escaped into the arms of a secret lover, according to Ellis, only nobody has ever met the gentleman in question.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Caro hasn’t been seen since. She hasn’t contacted her family, hasn’t touched her bank account, hasn’t used a credit card, or applied for welfare, or visited a doctor, or picked up a speeding ticket, or lodged a tax return, or travelled overseas. She hasn’t sent her kid a Christmas card or a birthday card. Lothian and Borders Police launched an investigation, but it petered out. They couldn’t prove Caro was dead and they couldn’t find any evidence of foul play.’