Benighted

by Kit Whitfield

  The knowledge of what he’s done sits beside me on the sofa, heavy and watchful.

  For a day, I avoid work. I stay in bed, bury my head, sleep when I can. I don’t dream.

  After that, I get up. I brush my hair, wash my face, and clean the water away with a towel, I tidy my clothes and put on my shoes and walk out of my door. My neighbor Mrs. Kitney stops me as I go out, wide-eyed: she’s heard I’m a heroine. I say, “Good morning,” quietly.

  “It must have been terrifying,” she sighs.

  I incline my head, a long way away from her.

  “Everyone’s talking about how brave you’ve been, Lola,” she discloses.

  “Oh.” I pull on my gloves, one finger at a time.

  “Tell me, weren’t you scared?” She’s standing in the hallway with a piece of gossip. She must be desperate to know.

  “I couldn’t say.” I give her a slow, distant nod. “Good morning, Mrs. Kitney.”

  I walk to the bus stop, I stand on the bus, I walk quietly into work. There will be files already on my desk, I know. New cases. Citizens who failed to make it to lock-up. Abandoned children. Homeless men who dozed off before moonrise and woke to find themselves in a different world. I shall sort through them, I shall do it by the book, put my fellow citizens gently into one tray or another, let their lives slip in and out of my hands and tidy them back into the system. It will be simple, easy, and it won’t always be wrong.

  My face is pale and still as a stone saint’s as I walk the corridors.

  I would make it into my office, except that as I ascend, I see Paul coming the other way. His face is unbruised now, his clothes are clean, he’s well. He looks like he did when we first met. I stop still, my hands press together, and I stand looking at him, making no sound, breathing in and out.

  He looks up and sees me, and my calm crackles over. “What are you doing here?” I sound hoarse, slapped.

  Paul makes an awkward gesture. “I came in to see about Jerry Farnham. Remember? Your alcoholic client. I’m still his social worker.”

  Jerry, the reason we met. “I haven’t heard anything about him. He was arrested and put in the cells last I heard.”

  “I know.” He stands very still. “Someone else took over his case. I came to see about getting him released.” He sounds almost as if that could be a problem, someone taking my case from me without my knowledge, as if I was still not past caring about it.

  “I see.” I lower my head. One of us will have to walk away if this is going to end.

  “Lola…” I don’t look up. “Can I talk to you?”

  Sadness is dragging at my hands and heels like running weights. “Let’s go in my office.”

  He follows me in. I sit on one side of the desk, he sits opposite me on the other. A lot of me wants to dismiss this, to say, We don’t have anything to talk about, but we do. It could finish in silence and absence, but I need to talk to him, even if I don’t have anything to say. I sit and fold my hands together, look down at my desk.

  Paul looks to and fro, as if the right thing to say was hidden somewhere in the room, tucked between the files on my shelves. Finally he goes still again and says, “We can’t just end it like this.”

  “I know.”

  There’s a silence. We both sit quietly, looking at each other’s hands.

  I thought he’d break it first, but it’s me who speaks. “Are you all right?”

  He shrugs. He knows I’m talking about the cells, the deprivation, the beatings. “I will be.”

  My voice stutters a little, but it isn’t nerves; the words are heavy in my mouth. “A-are you seeing a counsellor? A lot of people do.” After we finish with them.

  He turns his head aside, half shaking it. “Not exactly. Friend of mine at work’s a counsellor. I’ve been spending a lot of evenings at his place.”

  “I’ve gone home,” I say. “I’ve moved back into my own apartment. I’m happier in my own place.”

  “I miss you,” he says. It stops me, makes me go still. He doesn’t say it as a plea, there are no requests or plans in it, just a flat statement. “You were in my apartment all the time before I got arrested.” He says “arrested” calmly. He’s brave. “When I’m back there now I keep remembering how used I was to having you around.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say. There aren’t any other words.

  He looks up at me, as if weighing what he says. “Listen. If I’d told you, if you’d known before it all happened that I did this with my friends…I know what you think of curfew breakers. When they arrested me. If you’d known I was one of them, would you have helped me?”

  I have to answer with the truth. This is a question that I’ll hear all my life. It almost seems fitting to say no, to put back the old fences, get behind the bareback name and fight off the world. I think, and I imagine it, put myself into a different past. “Yes,” I say, and I believe it’s true.

  He looks at me, looks away. “Did you think I was in on killing your friend?”

  I go back to that time, feel it through. “I think—I thought you might have been.” He shifts, raises an eyebrow, and I have to explain. “That was as bad as being sure. I’d trusted you. I don’t often trust people, but I trusted you.”

  “Did you love me?”

  “Yes.” I don’t have to think for a moment before I say that. I feel soaked through with sadness, exhausted with sadness, but there’s a freedom somewhere, a sense of calm. We’re telling each other the truth, we can ask each other anything. A sharp-edged spring is loosening inside me. “Did you love me?”

  “Yes.”

  “You said you did in the cells. Did you mean it then?”

  “Yes,” he says. He says the word slowly, but there’s no pause before saying it. Afterward, though, there’s a silence, we’re both too tired to push forward.

  “I heard you caught the killer,” Paul says.

  “Where did you hear it?”

  “I—I spoke to your sister.”

  I look up, but I’m beyond surprise. “Did you call her?”

  He shakes his head, turning it slowly. “No, she called me. She called my department at work and asked around till she found me.”

  Without knowing why she did it, I think of Becca and remember that I love her. “What did she want?”

  “She was worried about you.”

  “Why did she call you?”

  He gestures, raising his hand. “She wanted to know what was really going on, I think. She’s a nice lady, your sister. It’s too bad you never introduced us.”

  “You’d probably like each other,” I say. I can picture them talking, and I can see now that they’d get on.

  “She said you found him by yourself, that you defended yourself when he came at you and you brought him in.”

  “He didn’t come at me.” I stop speaking, let the sentence fall. “I just shot him.”

  Paul doesn’t answer.

  “Do you know where I was the morning before I shot him? I was in church. I was on my knees praying to Our Lady.”

  Paul looks down. “Well.”

  I tuck my chin down on my hands, clasping each other for comfort.

  “Were you trying to kill him?” I look up, look at him properly, see his bright blue eyes gazing at me.

  “No.” I keep looking, take a deep breath. “No. I don’t think I’m really a killer.” Whatever he says to that, I feel like I’m saying a base-note truth about myself.

  “I never thought you were.”

  I want to know. “Did you ever think that I’d hurt you, while you were down in the cells?”

  “No.”

  “I was trying to wound him,” I say. “Not just because I knew he could overpower me if I tried to arrest him by myself. I was trying to wound him.”

  “Still telling harsh truths,” Paul says.

  There’s a pause, we sit opposite each other.

  “What do you want, Paul?”

  He runs his lower lip through his teeth, sits back in his chair.
“I’m not over you,” he says.

  “Oh.” I have absolutely no answer to that.

  He shakes his head, says again, “I’m not over you.”

  It isn’t I love you, it isn’t I forgive you. It doesn’t mean either of those things. I try to ask the question, I have to think for a while about how to put it so it isn’t a request. “Will you ever forgive me for what happened?”

  He shakes his head. “I—I don’t know. I don’t think much in terms of forgiveness, I guess.”

  “That’s not very Christian,” I say.

  “You’re the one who was praying. I…God, I don’t know. I miss you. That isn’t about whether I forgive you or not. I lied to you, so you didn’t help me. Now—things aren’t settled. I don’t know.”

  Things aren’t settled. He doesn’t know. I don’t know what to say to him.

  “Listen,” he says. “Where are you in all this?”

  I shake my head, open my mouth, but nothing comes out.

  “If you had your wish, what would you want to happen?”

  I don’t know what I want now. Everything is gone. I look at him, talk normally, as if this was just a conversation. “I wish things could be the way they were before you got arrested and everything happened.”

  He looks at me to see if I mean it, then says, “So do I.”

  I keep my hands away from him, I don’t reach out. “What do you want?” I say.

  “I miss how things were.”

  “That’s how you feel. It isn’t what you want.” The look he gives me is almost wry. I guess he was used to me doing things the hard way. The blood runs through my veins cool as tap water, and I can’t remember how to find things funny.

  “I’ve done some bad things.” I speak again before he can answer me. “Worse than you know. And I know things worse than you know as well. I’m not a real person anymore.”

  “You look real enough to me.” His expression isn’t quite patient.

  “Why did you come back here? After everything that happened here, how could you stand to be back in this building?”

  He flexes his hands. “I don’t like black spots in my mind. I didn’t want my last memories of this place to be what happened downstairs.”

  That’s what he says, that he wants to come back to a place where we put him through the Inquisition, because he wants better memories of it. Black spots in the mind. Brain damage at birth. “You’re a better person than me,” I say.

  He shrugs. “I’m out of their reach. They can see me but they can’t do anything about it. It’s sort of satisfying. No one can do anything to me now. Except maybe you.”

  I sit at my desk, and I think about what he said.

  I think about getting away with things.

  Somewhere on the other side of this is the woman I wanted to be, the woman who would have done what I should have done, who would have known what it was. Not someone cross-hatched with scars, not someone carrying an armful of dead babies. Are there parents who accepted Parkinson’s offer? People who know what he did to children?

  Johnny did. When Johnny tried to protect the new children Parkinson shattered the back of his neck with a silver bullet.

  Seligmann will go down for that. We give the doctor a scapegoat, we wash his sins away. Johnny is silenced. Parkinson can tell himself that nothing ever happened, and no one will say otherwise. He can walk the streets like an innocent man.

  I think about what Paul said, about wanting his last memories to be better ones.

  When Becca comes to see me, she’s impressed at the look of my apartment. I’ve washed the floors, the shelves, the windows, the curtains, I’ve thrown away half of what I own. There were a couple of days where I couldn’t sit still, couldn’t even stand without pacing, and I ended up walking to a hardware shop and buying cans of paint. My living room has become paler. Becca calls the color cream, I call it bone. It looks all right, I think. Different, anyway. I just couldn’t stand being surrounded by red walls.

  She sits Leo on the sofa beside me, leans him back, and he keeps upright; his spine is flat and sturdy, he’s balanced. I shake his hand and tell him what a clever boy he is, and he tips forward into my lap. I hoist him up, let him gnaw at me with his sharpening gums. My free hand rests on his head, the round warm little skull sheltering his clean, unbruised brain. As he nips and scrapes my skin, I hold on to him. Parkinson delivered him. I saw it happen. I remember asking Parkinson if he would come feet-first like he should, saying that Becca didn’t want a bareback baby. If I hadn’t been there, might Parkinson have looked at the notes, seen Becca had a bareback sister and decided she was a prime candidate for a mutilated child?

  His teeth on the heel of my hand are becoming too painful, so I pull away and let him bite my fingers. His chest is barely wider than my palm, and it rises and falls against me, fast and steady. My sister’s perfect son. Have I saved him?

  “Becca,” I say over Leo’s head, “I need to ask you a favor. A big one.”

  When Johnny went to see Parkinson, he went alone. He took a gun, and Parkinson took it off him and shattered his skull.

  When I go, I go with my sister. Her thriving son rides in a stroller before her, and she waits with me. She doesn’t quite understand, but when I tell her I can’t explain, she comes with me anyway.

  The foyer carpet crushes under my feet like moss, the walls glow. There’s a pretty receptionist with amber freckles and neat white teeth who smiles up at me.

  “Do you have an appointment?” she asks.

  “I don’t,” I say. “But I wondered if it would be possible to see Dr. Parkinson. It needn’t take very long.” She wrinkles her forehead. “Could you give him a message, at least?”

  “Of course.” She reaches for a pen; it’s black and glossy with a gold band around it.

  “Could you tell him I’ve been thinking about what he said?”

  Her lashes flick down as she watches her hand write the message. I’ll never know if she knows.

  We sit in the elegant reception room for more than an hour before we’re finally allowed through. I take the scarf from around my neck and dangle it above Leo’s face to pass the wait, and he reaches up for it. He can grab things now, he’s accurate. He catches it every time.

  When Dr. Parkinson finally appears in the door, Becca stands, gathers Leo up, and walks in with me. I glance at her, indicate she can wait in the foyer if she wants, but she shakes her head, takes a firmer grip on her son and walks ahead of me through the door.

  I study Parkinson as I come in. All the things I’ve noticed before, the straight back and clean hair, the skin aging smoothly as fine suede, they’re still there. His nails are pink and rather wide, the pale cuticles rise in a steep curve to cover half the area. I look him over for marks, scars, but my eyes slip up and down his face, finding nothing. He can’t have passed a life with no cuts or slashes, I know. He’s just a lyco. Nothing’s cut him so deep that it wouldn’t heal at the end of each moon night.

  “How are you, Ms. Galley?” he asks. There’s no aggression there, not even unwillingness, which surely any straight doctor would feel if a patient turned up and demanded to see them in the middle of a working day. Jones was as good as his word, there’s been nothing on the news about me arresting Seligmann, but Parkinson knows I work for DORLA. That I’m a bareback. That’s all he thinks he needs to know about me.

  “I’m very well, thank you. I do hope you’ll forgive me turning up unannounced like this.” I’m a legal adviser in a government department, and I work hard. I’m a professional. I can do a civil voice as well as he can, if I know I need to.

  “That’s quite all right.” He glances over at Becca. She’s sat herself down in a chair in the corner, and is sitting Leo up on her lap, pulling his shirt straight.

  “You remember my sister, I’m sure,” I say. “And Leo. You delivered him.”

  Parkinson glances from me to her, just for a second. He doesn’t look certain, but I sound confident about Becca’s presence, and
he’s waiting for me to confide in him. He can’t afford to protest. “How nice to see you again,” he says.

  Becca nods, and raises Leo’s hand as if in greeting.

  “I hope you received all the results satisfactorily,” he says to me.

  He means the letters confirming that I’m still all right, that nothing has made me sterile. “Yes, thank you.”

  He’s waiting for me to make the next move, but I leave a pause.

  “I understand you had something you wanted to discuss,” he says in the end.

  I smile. “Yes. The truth is, I’ve been thinking about it, and—well, I’m interested in what you said. But there’s a few things I wanted to get straight. I just wondered if I could discuss them with you first.” I sound like I’m leveling with him.

  He smiles back at me and takes a seat. “Of course. Any questions you have, I’m happy to answer.” It’s a prepared sentence, one he must have said many times before.

  “The thing is—well, this isn’t my area. I was wondering about the legalities of it, that’s the first thing.” He doesn’t have to hear the warning that I’m a lawyer in that if he doesn’t want to. I sit myself down opposite him and wait for him to answer.

  “I wouldn’t concern yourself with the legalities too much,” he says.

  “I am concerned, though.” I don’t sound forceful, just unconvinced.

  “I wouldn’t know about that,” he says pleasantly. “I just follow the laws as they stand.”

  “As long as they’re applicable.”

  “Yes indeed. You have to exercise a little common sense when it comes to laws that are out of date.”

  I smile at him. “I think you’ve just told me my whole career in miniature.”

  “Your career?”

  “Didn’t I mention it? I’m a lawyer.” There’s a swift, small instant of silence. “I specialize in curfew law and anmorphic law generally.”

  “That must be interesting,” he says. His voice is too polite for a conversation this far along.