Bright Spark

by Gavin Smith

  “It wasn’t just Jeremy, of course. Dad has needed care, very little at first then more and more as the years rolled by. Between them, they struggled to make ends meet. They both did whatever work they could get, my dad limited by his ‘leaky lungs’ as he called them, my mum by the time and energy it took to care for her boys.”

  “So you became deputy mother?”

  “I always was. I never knew any different. University was a wrench. But I cut the cord and never quite got back into mum’s good books. She always supported me, consciously at least. But she found it hard to take when I went. And I hate to admit it but I relished the freedom, the distance. Still do. I don’t visit as often as I should, even though they’re only a mile and a half uphill from me.

  “Things did get easier for them when the class action settled. My dad’s contractors had admitted their negligence years earlier but the bickering over money dragged on. The eventual pay-out meant they’d never have to worry about work again. It paid off my student debt too. I couldn’t persuade them – I mean her – to move. I wish they had. Christ, imagine it. None of this…..

  “Irrelevant. They wouldn’t. Jeremy needs his safe, permanent, orderly environment. Dad…I’m not sure. Sometimes he rebels but he hasn’t the strength or the will. Mum doesn’t see why they should move. There’s always some excuse: the money’s got to last; all our memories are here; the neighbours are so nice; this is our home and the wretched neighbours won’t force us away.

  “So, there you have it.” She glanced at the kitchen clock and at the empty cafetiere. “How did you get all that out of me? I’ve spent too much time on my own this week. Must have wanted to talk.”

  “Jeremy has quite a way with words.”

  “Oh, no you don’t. It’s my turn. More?” She waggled the whisky bottle at him.

  “Depends on the question.”

  “You’ve had full disclosure on my family background,” she began, voice softened by the whisky, “so you may think you know how I came to be a bleeding-heart, ambulance-chasing, do-gooding, Guardian-reading lawyer. Now you need to tell me how you came to be such a bloody-minded, door-bashing, grammar-abusing, collar-feeling copper. Did that come out right? Too rude?”

  “Not at all. I think you could be far ruder if you really wanted to be.”

  “God, could I? I’ve always wanted to be rude to a copper. I mean, properly rude. Not just making sniffy comments about oppressive tactics over some sticky, horrible interview room table, but I mean effing and blinding and getting chased and arrested. Don’t suppose you brought a hat I could steal?”

  “Didn’t even bring cuffs to restrain you with.”

  “Hey, come on,” she shouted, bluster covering her blushes. “Stop being inappropriate and answer the question.”

  Harkness gripped the tumbler half full of whisky with a sobering jolt of pain from his digits. He lifted it reverentially to his lips and allowed the amber fluid to trickle its heat over his cracked lips and under his tongue.

  “Nobody knows this. Nobody in this city knows what I’m about to tell you. Not my boss. Not Slowey. Not Hayley. Even if you end up suing me or testifying against me in a court of law, this cannot go beyond the two of us.”

  “How can I promise that?” Her words were vigorous again, the haze in her eyes evaporating. “Without knowing what you’re about to say…..”

  “I know.” He held up his hands. “Listen, what if I promise you that nothing in my past could give rise to any kind of legal action whatsoever, with or without your testimony?”

  “The terms of the contract are agreeable.” She hoisted herself onto a kitchen stool and clutched her own whisky glass between both hands to help master the urge to grab a notebook and pen. “I herewith accept the aforementioned terms.”

  “I’ll trust you then.”

  Harkness stood, almost thrust his hands in his pockets, realised how much that would hurt, shook his hands as though the pain and doubt could be so simply cast off, sighed and propped himself on the stool again.

  “I should have rehearsed this. My big moment. Something that shouldn’t be so significant… I mean I didn’t think I was defined by it but maybe I just didn’t….. It’s just that failing to nail Firth and failing to save Firth mean that I’ve failed to make something right. It makes no sense of course. I know there’s no great cosmic plan, just long, tangled chains of interaction. And the roles we typecast ourselves into.”

  “I’ve underestimated you. But I still have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “When I was eight years old, I killed; that is, I caused a fire that killed another child.” He shrugged and sipped his whisky. “That’s the short version.”

  “I don’t quite know what to say.”

  “I know the feeling.”

  “And the long version? I think I need to know now.”

  “I wasn’t a bad kid. Good, stable home. Loving parents. Perhaps a bit too brainy for my own good. I went through a phase of playing with fire. Started with a movie: ‘The Battle of Britain’. Shooting down the filthy hun just wasn’t satisfying unless he burned all the way down. You know. Maybe you don’t. Those yellow-nosed fighter planes turning to comets, plummeting in flames, scorching a crescent of black smoke and sparks into the blue sky. It was so transcendent. Not that I’d have used that word but the sight of it fascinated me.

  “So in my own feeble way, I tried to re-enact it; slathering glue all over model aeroplanes, sometimes sticking fan-tails of cotton wool to the tail, nicking matches from dad’s smoking drawer by the back door, then lighting it and chucking it out of a tree or the bedroom window. Sometimes worked, sometimes didn’t. I dabbled with mum’s nail-polish remover which really did the trick. Once got myself a hiding when I threw one into dad’s compost heap one bone-dry summer day. Before I knew it there was smoke everywhere. Dad and the bloke next-door had to turn hose-pipes on it. Burned a hole in the fence and stank for days.

  “I didn’t learn. Just took my vice further afield. One day, I was playing ‘dogfights’ in the fields with Matty from next door. Nice enough kid, as far as I remember. Always ready to play out if I was at a loose end. Never minded being the Germans. Anyway, after an hour or two of bickering and getting sweaty in the fields, we wandered onto a farm and a big shady barn seemed like a nice cool place to hide from the sun for a while. It was packed with hot, dry bales of hay. You can guess the rest.

  “I decided it was time for the Messerschmitt to go down in flames. Applied my trusty lighter. The fire seemed to spill and spread, like it was just waiting for us. I don’t know if you’ve ever had that feeling, the instant, appalling recognition of your own awesome stupidity, the mistake that will cost more than you’ll ever earn to put right. I bolted. Shouted at the other kid to run. Got well clear and assumed he’d be right behind me.

  “But he was a good boy. He had left the barn; I know this because when I turned from the safety of the tree-line, I saw him, walking back into all that smoke and heat and shadow with a bucket. He got out only to find a rusty, leaky bucket, fill it with a miserable trickle of water, then go back in. Inevitability didn’t have a say in it. That good little boy chose death without knowing it. Trying to make things right. Not wanting to get into trouble for hanging around with me. Maybe not wanting to get me into trouble. It’s all irrelevant now.

  “I should have gone back. Should have dragged him along in the first place. He was such a scrawny little thing and I was such a lanky lump, it would have been so easy to pick him up like a rugby ball and run pell-mell. But I didn’t. I can’t tell you why. Shock may have played a part because the next few hours are still a blur. Perhaps I thought there was nothing I could do, or just that I couldn’t risk getting caught. Maybe I didn’t think at all, just let fear have its way with me.”

  “What happened?” she urged, rapt now, knuckles locked around her glass.

  “He died. That’s the main part. Burning bale fell on him. I doubt it would have been heavy enough to crush him, but I
hope it smothered him. Otherwise he would have burned. Nobody ever told me much more than that and I never wanted to know. Still don’t. The farm hands came but there were so few of them and they didn’t know anybody was inside. They just stopped it spreading with hoses and buckets and called the fire brigade.”

  “I don’t know how to respond.”

  “You don’t have to. I don’t need you to. That’s not why……I mean, I’m not looking for a shoulder or a confessor.”

  “You could do worse.” She held his eyes, showing him the same earnest compassion she must have shown many other broken men who’d been forced to swallow consequences.

  “I need to get this out. I need somebody to tell me who I am, what I am. I thought I’d resolved it. But I’m still trapped on this damned hamster-wheel thirty years later, re-enacting that day.”

  “So tell me.” She topped up both glasses, emptying the bottle into her own. “Did that lanky boy ever leave the tree-line?”

  “Sometimes I doubt it. I must have been catatonic. I just squatted there, rocking with panic, knowing what I’d done, mind looping through childish escape plans over and over. I slapped myself, scratched myself with thorns and stones, made myself grasp nettles. I couldn’t change it. I couldn’t accept it. I’d be hanged or sent to gaol. My life was over.

  “I could kill myself. I could run and keep running. Live off the land. Join the Merchant Navy or the Foreign Legion. I had to be punished but I hadn’t meant it to happen. Maybe a time machine was the answer. Maybe it was a superhero’s foundation story and atonement was my inspiration and destiny. Had to wait for nightfall otherwise I’d be seen by the lynch-mob who prowled the hedgerows, flexing and looping their noose ready for my just desserts.

  “My mind just kept racing around and around that circuit of delusion. Until they found me, near dusk. The local bobby and some other coppers I hadn’t seen before. And my dad. An old geezer had seen us running towards the barn, knew our faces and where we lived. When the firemen pulled the smaller body out of the wreckage, word spread, I was missing and connections were made.

  “So I had a short, silent trip in the back of a police van, sharing a bench with the scariest copper I’ve seen to this day. He smelled like men tend not to now; tobacco sharp enough to make your eyes water, wool and polyester he’d been sweating in for weeks, boot polish, that lunchtime’s beer leaking out of his pores. He just chain-smoked these poisonous fags, occasionally turning to breathe smoke it into my face and shake his head at me.

  “I still wonder what my parents would have done if they’d had first crack at me. As it was, some old-school detective put me through the mill in some grim, Victorian hole of a police station. No tapes. Just him, me and my mum behind me, deathly silent, biting her tongue, staring hard into the back of my head as if she needed to take a peek inside. He felt compelled to give me the tour too. Showed me the special chair where they used to birch people. The haunted cell that smelled of open sewers where the wife-beater hanged himself last week.

  “He laid it out for me. Chain-smoking. They all seemed to. A new ciggie for every new line of questioning, lighting it with the old one. I did get cautioned but I think that was for effect because it did scare the shit out of me. I was so desperate to confess that I nearly puked on his shoes. But he wouldn’t let me. Whatever I said had to be according to his script. Did I know I was a killer? I did. Was I going to answer him honestly and to the utmost of my ability? I was. Did I know the heartache I’d caused to my own parents and the other boy’s? I surely did.

  “Eventually he let me spill my guts. I started with the compost heap fire from weeks before and ended with my cowardly thoughts of escape to sea. I offered to go straight to gaol and pleaded for clemency; I wasn’t sure what it was, thought it was a fruit traditionally offered to judges, but I’d heard it on the news and some people seemed to do well out of it.

  “More for form’s sake than because he wanted to, he baited me. Told me I was a murderer, that I’d got it in for Matty, thought it’d be funny to burn him alive. Challenged me to have a good laugh. When I just kept sobbing, he told me I was a coward too. I just agreed and pleaded to be punished. He lost interest in the end and I was left in the hanged man’s cell overnight, shivering, hungry and stinking of soot, fags and urine, listening hard for the feet at the door, the men with short hair and meaty forearms who’d hood me, bind my hands and frog-march me straight through for the long drop.

  “Next morning, they took my fingerprints and mug-shot and my parents drove me home. My dad wouldn’t look at me and my mum just went through the motions, making meals, telling me to brush my teeth, seeing me to bed on time. I couldn’t believe my luck; I thought I’d passed beyond such privileges. I heard them arguing in whispers. A few things got smashed. Next door was so quiet. For a day or two, I crept around the house, reading old books, staring at the TV, wondering if it had all been a bad dream somehow, fearing that out there, somewhere, a noose was being coiled or an axe sharpened.

  “And the rest of my life somehow unfolded that way; the sky rumbled but the storm never quite broke. It was as if my parents were bereaved by proxy. They didn’t lose their own child in a clean and innocent manner. Worse, another child died because of their child who was now indelibly tainted.

  “Of course, I was too young to be charged with anything, but I had years of appointments with various youth workers and psychologists, who were disappointed to find that I hadn’t been abused or neglected and wasn’t educationally sub-normal. And we moved. In a hurry. My dad was a book-keeper and my mum did shop-work or anything else she could get with part-time hours. They weren’t rolling in it and it was a strain, but at least they could find work elsewhere.

  “I never did speak to Matty’s parents but I know my dad did. I expected him to come back black and blue but some offences are just too big for rough acts and words. The family car got smashed up one night but that could have been anyone. My dad paid off the farmer. They over-borrowed on their next mortgage and gave him the excess for his barn. There was no way of compensating Matty’s parents.”

  “And now you’re a policeman.”

  “Surprising?”

  “No. But masochistic. It was an accident. A stupid accident.”

  “With consequences.”

  “You were eight years old.” She shook her head, stood and stared into the garden at the deepening shadows. “It could have happened to absolutely anyone. And you didn’t make him go back inside.”

  “I didn’t stop him either.”

  “So you’ve got a martyr complex.”

  “Yes. No.” He drained his whisky and exhaled. “We all moved on. I turned out alright in the end. A graduate copper no less. But I still carry it around. And with Firth….well, I just wonder how much of a grip it has on me. Am I in this miserable job just to make amends?”

  “You should know this. You need to know this. You have nothing in common with Nigel Firth. Thirty years ago, you caused one accident. His entire life was a car crash.”

  “You’re generous. With your time. With your compassion.”

  “I can afford it. I’m on holiday.” She placed her glass on the sink and momentarily allowed her eyes to settle on her laptop and the outsize clock looming over it. “But it is getting late.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. I should go.”

  “You’ve spent a lot of time here without putting pen to paper. I know that’s not just a practical issue either.”

  She glided delicately towards him as if she were carrying something fragile and easily dropped. Rooting herself to the tiled floor before him, she rested a hand on the work surface and inched it towards his, wanting to touch but not quite daring to cause or share pain.

  “I’m not a suspect. My mum is potty but she isn’t some raving arsonist. Your case is all but dead. So tell me. Honestly. Why did you come? What’s your next question?”

  “You know.” His pulse thrummed in his ears and his throat tightened. “I hope you know. Or I’m a
bigger fool than I thought I was.”

  “You’re not such a fool.” She allowed herself to drift into his reach and he felt the warm eddies of her breath on his lips, allowing her scent to quicken his heart. “But we’re both stupid. And of course I know.”

  She pressed her hips against his belly, cupped his head in her hands, hesitated as if he might flinch, then darted a kiss at his mouth with the blind haste of a playground dare. Something moiled in his guts and a fat woman’s laughter raked at his conscience. Destruction bred destruction. He didn’t care about the past. It had no place inside this moment. He needed to feel something other than pain, shame and rage. He could balk, leave this place and find his way home. He could say no, but instead chose to embrace the sin and have the courage of his weakness. Besides, the betrayal was complete the moment he left home to come here.

  He studied her wide open eyes and her parted, expectant smile. He smiled back and embraced her lips with his own, relishing their cool moistness against his own roughened flesh. She clasped herself to him, pressing her breasts and belly against his chest, lifting his face into hers, fluttering her tongue over his then withdrawing to fix his eyes again with her own, quizzical now.

  “Who’s Hayley?” she asked, hands clasped behind his neck.

  “She’s my….” The easy lie wedged itself in his throat.

  “It doesn’t matter. I just need to know.” She kissed him again, gently tugging at his lower lip with her teeth. “We’re both grown-ups. We need each other. For now. But no games. No lies. That’s a deal-breaker.”

  “She’s my partner. We live together. We’re in a rocky…”

  “Enough.” She kissed his cheek, draping her hair over his eyes. He wanted to lose himself in her, to let the torrent tear away everything but this sparking contact. He wanted to undress her, to feel her skin under his fingertips, but fire would deny him this unless he wanted to meld pleasure with pain. “One more thing. You’re not actually on duty, are you?”