Right now I feel as though my mind is slipping. My emotions have been manipulated and my reason distracted. It’s like watching a magician using sleight of hand, cleverly drawing my attention away so that I don’t see the ‘palm’ or the ‘ditch’ or the ‘steal’.
I can make a connection between Gordon Ellis, Ray Hegarty and Sienna, but I don’t know what glue holds them together. And where does the Crying Man come into this, or Lance Hegarty? Someone killed my dog. Someone ran me off the road. Gordon Ellis gave me a strange look when I mentioned Gunsmoke. It was like he didn’t understand.
I have to go back to the beginning and question everything, but right now I’m too tired to think. I’m dirty, unshaven, exhausted and I want a shower. I want a bed. I want to square things with Julianne and Charlie.
Ruiz drops me at the terrace and does a three-point turn, heading back into Bristol. Seeing Novak Brennan again has reignited something inside him - an instinct that never leaves a detective, even a retired one.
Opening the door of the terrace I get a flashback of last night. The reminders are smeared across the kitchen floor - a trail of blood showing where Gordon Ellis sat holding his head, where he pissed his pants, where he grinned at me with his bloodstained teeth. Filling the sink with hot soapy water, I begin mopping and rinsing, twisting the towel and watching the pink wash run between my fingers.
The answering machine is flashing:
Bruno Kaufman:
Joe, this is beyond the pale. You’ve now missed two lectures and two staff meetings - do you want to keep this job? Your students are complaining that you’re not answering their emails. Call me. Have an explanation.
Clunk!
Annie Robinson:
Listen, you prick! I’m not some pimply-faced teenager sitting by the phone. I’m old enough to deserve some respect. If you don’t want to see me, fine! But at least have the decency to call or tell me to my face. Thanks for nothing!
Clunk!
I wince. It’s not like I’m ducking to avoid a bullet or a rock, it’s an internal shudder - the sort of wince you get when you spend a night with a woman and don’t follow it up.
Annie isn’t the first woman to produce this reaction in me. That dubious honour belongs to Brenda, a girl my parents employed to clean our house one summer when I was home from boarding school. I saved up my pocket money so I could look at Brenda’s breasts. She charged me fifty pence a time and double if I wanted her to lift her skirt and pull her knickers up tightly, leaving little to my imagination.
Brenda lived in the local village and had a brother, Jonathan, who was my age. It was Jonathan who first told me about the mechanics of sex, but it wasn’t until Brenda gave me a personal guided tour of female anatomy that I believed it was possible for Tab A to fit into Slot B.
I wince when I think of Brenda because of the sadness in her eyes and because five years later, I teased and cajoled and promised that I loved her as she slipped her knickers down in the backseat of a car (which the ever-willing girl had done many times before) and allowed me to lose my virginity. Brenda wanted to be close to someone and this was the only way she knew how.
Annie Robinson is sweet, well-meaning, good-natured and slightly damaged - or maybe I should say bruised. The sound of her voice makes me wince. It tells me everything I need to know.
At three o’clock I pick Emma up from school. She has a sticker on her jumper that says ‘Best Counter’.
‘I can count to sixty-one,’ she announces proudly.
‘That’s very good, but what comes next?’
‘Sixty-two.’
‘So you can count higher.’
‘I can, but the teacher wanted me to stop. I think she was getting bored.’
When I laugh, Emma gets cross. She doesn’t like people laughing unless she understands why.
As soon as she gets to the terrace she goes looking for her Snow White dress.
‘It’s in the wash,’ I tell her.
‘When will it be out of the wash?’
‘Not for a long time.’
‘You can put it in the dryer.’
‘It will shrink.’
She looks at me doubtfully and then opens the washing machine. ‘You haven’t even started.’
‘I’ve been busy.’
Eventually she searches through the dirty washing until she finds the dress and puts it on, ignoring the chocolate and bolognaise stains.
Charlie arrives at about four, dropping her bag in the hallway.
‘How are things?’ I ask.
‘Guess.’
She blows a strand of hair from her eyes, but doesn’t look at me.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Let me think. That’s right, my father is an idiot, that’s about it.’
‘That’s not very polite, Charlie.’
‘I was going to call you an arsehole, so “idiot” is far more polite.’
Slumping angrily on to the sofa, she picks up the remote and flicks aggressively through the channels without taking any notice of what she’s ignoring.
‘I can explain.’
‘It’s all over the school. You beat up Mr Ellis and put him in hospital. He’s everyone’s favourite teacher - which makes me as popular as swine flu. I’m going to have to leave school, leave the country, change my name.’
‘I think you’re overdramatising this.’
‘Am I?’ I can hear the hated tone in her voice.
‘Gordon Ellis said things about you.’
‘What things?’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘Yes, it does. Tell me!’
‘He said that he’d slept with you.’
‘And what - you believed him and beat him up! I babysat his little boy, Dad. I didn’t sleep with anyone - that’s just stupid. Gordon wasn’t even there . . .’
‘Don’t call him Gordon.’
She shoots me a look.
‘I know things about him, Charlie.’
‘And you don’t trust me - is that it?’
‘That’s not it.’
‘So what were you doing - defending my honour?’
‘It wasn’t like that.’
Charlie looks at me dismissively.
‘What’s going to happen when I bring a boyfriend home? Are you going to beat him up too? Maybe you want to beat up my football coach - he’s a bit of a lech. And what about the creep on the bus who’s always perving at me? You could beat him up.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘I’m not the one who’s being ridiculous. I’m starting to understand why Mum left you.’
The statement cuts through the hard spots, right to the soft centre where it hurts the most. Charlie senses that she’s gone too far, but she doesn’t take it back, which hurts even more.
Brushing past me, she pulls on her coat.
‘Where are you going?’
‘Out.’
‘Where?’
‘Away from you.’
The door closes and I tell myself that she’ll forgive me eventually and grasp what happened. And then I realise that I don’t want her to understand. I don’t want her to know what Gordon Ellis said and how much I wanted to kill him. I want to stop her knowing things like that.
‘Can I watch TV?’ whispers Emma.
She’s standing in the doorway. How much did she hear?
‘Come on in, Squeak, I’ll find you something to watch.’
A few hours later I take Emma for a walk, looking for Charlie. Letting myself into the cottage, I find her riding boots missing from the laundry. She’s across the lane in Haydon Field where she stables her mare in the barn.
Slipping inside, I watch as Charlie throws a quilted pad on Peggy’s back, smoothing it down. I help her lift the saddle from the railing and set it in place. Charlie ducks under Peggy and buckles the strap, pulling it tight.
Inserting her boot into the left stirrup, she swings herself upwards and looks down at me.
‘I’m sorry for what I
said.’
‘I deserved it.’
A braided ponytail hangs beneath her riding hat. ‘You don’t have to worry about me and boys.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘I have a horse.’
She laughs, kicks her heels and bolts away, thundering across the field, her hair flying and jodhpurs clinging to her young body. In every sense she’s getting further and further away from me.
34
Norman Mailer said there were four stages in a marriage. First the affair, then the marriage, then children and finally the fourth stage, without which you cannot know a woman, the divorce.
That night Julianne visits me and hands me the papers. I’ve just taken two sedatives and drunk a large Scotch, desperate to sleep. The alcohol and the Valium are starting to work when she appears, pushing past me at the front door and striding into the kitchen. She spies the bottle of Scotch and it seems to confirm her suspicions.
Calmly and dispassionately, she tells me about her decision. She wants me to understand that she has thought this through very carefully. She might use the term ‘long and hard’ but my mind is fuzzy. I feel as though I’m floating on the ceiling, looking down at myself, hearing myself trying to explain.
‘Gordon Ellis broke in here and said things about Charlie - terrible things - I just sort of snapped.’
‘Snapped?’
‘Yeah.’
‘You don’t snap, Joe. You never snap.’
‘I know, but this was different.’
‘Did you want to kill him?’
I hesitate. ‘Yes.’
She is quiet a long time, staring into space, her lips pressed into thin straight lines. I keep waiting for her to speak. ‘Is that how little you think of us?’
‘What?’
‘Is that how little we mean to you?’ I can see anger climbing into her face. ‘You tried to kill someone. What if you’re sent to prison? What sort of father will you be then? We’re not living in the Middle Ages, Joe, men don’t challenge each other to duels. They don’t bash each other’s heads in.’
She flicks hair from her eyes. I can see the twin furrows above her nose. Charlie has them, too. I want to defend myself, but the drugs have turned my brain to treacle.
Julianne sighs and hands me the divorce papers. ‘It’s time to move on, Joe.’
‘What does that mean exactly?’
‘What does what mean?’
‘Moving on. You see, I don’t think we move at all. We run up and down on the spot and the world moves under us. Days, weeks, months, pass beneath our feet.’
‘So you’re saying we’re like hamsters on a wheel?’
‘Going nowhere.’
Julianne scoffs at this and tells me to grow up. Looking at her hands more than my face, she asks me to sign the papers, saying something about it being both our faults. We got engaged too young and too quickly - six months and three days after our first date.
‘This isn’t about love any more, Joe. You joke about your Parkinson’s. You pretend nothing has changed. But you’re sadder. You’re self-absorbed. You obsess. You monitor every twitch and tremor. You’re like an archaeologist piecing together his own remains, finding bits and pieces but nothing whole. It breaks my heart.’
Her face is drifting in and out of focus. I concentrate on the tiny vein pulsing on her neck just below where her hair curls and touches her skin. Her heart never stops beating. Mine feels like it’s slowly breaking or grinding to a halt like an engine without oil.
I remember our wedding day, standing at the altar, saying, ‘I do.’ After we kissed I wanted to punch the air and yell, ‘Hey! Look at me! I got the girl.’
On my side of the congregation were doctors and surgeons and my mates from university. Julianne’s side was full of her hippy friends, painters, sculptors, poets and actors. My father called them the ‘Three P’s’ - potheads, pissheads and pill-heads.
‘Are you listening to me, Joe?’ she asks.
‘Can we talk about this tomorrow?’
‘There’s nothing else to talk about.’
‘Please? I’m exhausted. I just need to sleep.’
She nods and stands. I feel unsteady on my feet.
‘Don’t hate me, Joe.’
‘I could never do that.’
She puts some dishes in the sink and tells me to go upstairs to bed.
‘Stay with me,’ I ask, ‘just for a few minutes.’
‘I don’t think that’s a good idea.’
My fingers touch her hair and I want to press my body against hers and put my lips against the pulsing vein in her neck. She opens her mouth to say something but changes her mind.
‘Stay.’
‘I have to go.’
‘Just five minutes.’
‘I can’t.’
‘Why?’
‘If I stay it will only make things worse.’
‘For you or for me?’
‘For both of us.’
As she opens the door, I see Annie Robinson on the doorstep about to ring the bell. Her eyes go wide and she rocks unsteadily on her feet.
‘Oh!’
‘I’m just leaving,’ says Julianne. ‘Annie, isn’t it?’
Annie giggles nervously. ‘I’m sorry - I laugh when I get embarrassed. It also happens when I drink.’ She leans forward and whispers, ‘I’ve been to the pub.’
‘That’s OK,’ says Julianne.
Annie looks at me accusingly. ‘I left messages for you.’
‘I’m sorry. I’ve been really busy.’
‘Were you busy ignoring me or just beating up Gordon Ellis? I was coming round to slap you in the face, but now I’m too drunk.’
‘I wasn’t ignoring you.’
‘Maybe I’ll just puke in your garden instead.’
Julianne looks even more uncomfortable.
Annie stumbles slightly and Julianne has to steady her. Annie apologises. ‘Don’t mind me - I made the mistake of fucking your husband.’
Julianne flinches.
Annie giggles. ‘This is pretty surreal, isn’t it?’
That’s not the word I’d use, but I’m not going to quibble. Succumbing to the pills and booze, I can barely keep my eyes open.
Julianne steps around Annie and hurries down the street, disappearing quickly from sight.
‘Can I see you tomorrow?’ I ask.
Annie’s nostrils flare and her voice changes. ‘You’re an arsehole!’
‘I’ve been told that already today - or maybe I was an idiot. I can’t remember now. I’m just so tired.’
‘Are you still sleeping with your wife?’
‘No.’
I can’t see Annie clearly any more. She says something about feeling ashamed and humiliated.
‘I only came round to give you some information.’
‘Information?’
‘About Gordon Ellis - we were at university together, remember? I was looking through some of my old photographs and I found something.’
I’m reading her lips.
‘There was someone else in one of the photographs. I only recognised him because he’s been in the papers. He was one of Gordon’s mates. They shared a house.’
‘Who?’
‘Novak Brennan.’
35
The South Bristol Crematorium and Cemetery is perched on a ridge overlooking Ashton Vale where rain clouds are threatening. Umbrellas hover above the mourners and beads of water cling to the panels of the hearse like costume jewels stuck on a black dress.
Ray Hegarty has a guard of honour and six police pallbearers. Ronnie Cray is among them, resplendent in her full dress uniform, sitting alongside the Deputy Chief Constable and a handful of other top brass.
Some of the regulars from the Fox and Badger have come to pay their respects, including Hector the publican and his daughter Susanne. The villagers are sitting together behind Helen, while the other side of the chapel is taken up by retired or serving police officers. Annie Robinson is also here, l
ooking hung-over despite the dark glasses and bright lipstick.
Helen Hegarty is just visible in the front pew, between Lance and Sienna, who has been allowed out of Oakham House for the funeral. Zoe’s wheelchair is partially blocking the central aisle, squeezed between the coffin and the pews.
Watching Sienna through the bowed heads, I can tell she’s lost weight and isn’t sleeping. She knows that people are staring at her, wondering whether she killed her father and why she did it. Pulling her coat tighter around her shoulders, she sinks down, trying to disappear completely.
The silence is a miasma, weighted with the inaudible breathing. I wish someone would play some music. Anything would be better than shuffling feet and seats creaking beneath buttocks.
High above us a tiny bell jangles once, twice, three times and the music starts. A hymn sung by a Welsh choir, played through the sound system.
I don’t like funerals. I know how stupid that sounds, but it’s not because of the bleedingly obvious. Whenever I come to a place like this I can’t shake the idea that death is something that can be transmitted like a disease or inhaled like a spore. What if it sprouts inside me like that Russian guy who inhaled a seed and had a fir tree growing in his lungs? What if I’m witnessing a dress rehearsal of my own fate?
When the service is over, the pallbearers carry Ray Hegarty’s coffin through a guard of honour to the graveside. Draped in a flag, it bears a framed photograph of a young man in a PC’s uniform, clear-eyed, square-jawed, ready to take on the dark side.
Sienna follows the coffin, glancing up occasionally as though looking for someone among the mourners. She makes eye contact with Annie Robinson and looks away.
Helen Hegarty moves with sure steps and dry eyes. Perhaps she is saving her tears for a less public occasion or has shed enough by now. Her long hair is unpinned and I notice how grey she has become and how the twin notches between her eyebrows have grown deeper.
The wind has sprung up, slapping the artificial grass against the side of the coffin. Words of comfort are ripped away and carried across the cemetery. Hats are held in place. Coats flap against knees. In a different part of the cemetery I spy a couple crouching to replace flowers at a child’s grave. A vase and a picture frame are cemented to the base of the headstone to stop them blowing away. A favourite toy has been pinned beneath wire like a butterfly in a display case.
Bleed For Me (joseph o'loughlin) Page 26