Prepared to Die

by Peter Dudgeon

  “Hello, Daniel, it’s me. Remember. The girl who re-enacted Abbey Road with you and Alison, Marco and Frank. The one who wore that ghastly peach meringue of a bridesmaid’s dress to your wedding without complaint. Well, with a little complaint …” She slipped into her best Welsh accent, "… if truth be told.” She smiled.

  Daniel reciprocated with the accent, “I’m not going to lie to you, depressed I am, and I’ll tell you for why …” And they laughed, tried to stop, which only made it funnier, and laughed some more. They’d always dropped into Gavin and Stacey talk when the dinner conversation between the four of them (Marcus was the fourth regular guest) had become dry and predictable. It had always irked Alison, bringing an edge of guilty pleasure to their fun.

  Charlotte wiped a happy tear from her cheek. “Many a true word spoken in jest eh?”

  Daniel gulped his coffee and nodded. “It’s hard Charlotte. So hard. I don’t know what I was expecting, but I wasn’t expecting this.”

  “What’s the worst of it? Don’t dance around it. Tell me. Get it off your chest.”

  “So many little things.”

  “Such as?”

  “The two veg peelers sitting in the kitchen drawer: the one you use with your thumb, which I like, the one you don’t, which she liked. I stare at hers and think, perhaps I’ll give hers a go, then I’m fighting the urge to bin it along with her other stuff. Every thing in that bloody house is the same.”

  “You’ve started clearing out?”

  He nodded, “Last night.”

  “You don’t have to do that on your own you know … more than happy to help.”

  “I know. But you’ve got the kids and your job - I’ve got the time to do it.”

  “For God’s sake Daniel, will you stop thinking about the practicalities. It’s like your brain’s stuck in this whirr of logic.”

  And there … it was out, as easily as that, as though Alison’s existence had been a dam, stopping the flow of Charlotte’s honesty, the unspoken type of honesty we spend our lives suppressing. And worse, she was right, her words were perfect: ‘stuck in this whirr of logic.’ He pictured a tornado of 1s and 0s, each thought making logical sense yet somehow caught in a larger shit storm as the winds of grief and obsession tried to show logic who’s boss.

  “Okay … you nailed it.”

  He realised her hand had stayed on his knee the whole time. She squeezed it, and said, “You’ll have me, Daniel, as much of my help as you need.” He wanted to cry then, but resisted it, and hugged her. Cardigan fluff tickled his nose. He continued to speak without letting go. “I’m stuck in so many ways. Stuck in that house, stuck in my pointless skin … I was a detective, I was a carer, I was a guitarist. Now who am I? Alison’s gone, the job’s gone, and when I pick up my six-string it’s like it’s angry at its neglect. We just don’t click anymore. I could never be a father, I’m no longer a son. So who am I Charlotte?”

  She forced him to release and placed a hand on each shoulder. With her steely, tell-it-straight look she said, “Who is a newborn baby Daniel? You could argue it's a useless, flailing, shitting lump who’s a drain on its parents. Or you could look at it like it’s a blank canvas that one day will be rich with identity and meaning and … and LIFE! I know it’s early days but this is just about how you think about it. You can do anything now. Your life could be about to start.”

  “I can’t be a father.”

  “Well maybe not, not biologically, anyway. But there’s so much more to life. That guitar of yours might be giving you bad vibes now, but think of it like you’ve been separated and you’re making a new fist of being back together. Stroke it, polish it, get your fingers back on those strings and you’ll soon be ripping up Highway to Hell in the Crown, just like the last five years were a brief detour in life. Then, after a while, you might feel like working again and - let’s face it - you’ll probably need to financially, let’s not duck that. You could start a new career, or rejoin the force-”

  “Service, police service.”

  “- whatever. The point is, this stage you’re at is inevitable and you can wallow your way through it, you can let that guitar and your career gather dust, or you can get on with it. And you’re going to wobble through that, Daniel, and I’ll be here to steady you, just as you steadied me at Alison’s funeral. I’ll have my arm round you all the way.”

  Charlotte let her arms melt away from his shoulders, her hands landing in her lap. Perhaps something was playing out on his face (my God she could always read him so well) because she paused, head tilted, observing him as his unseeing eyes drifted to some point beyond the coffee table.

  “Come on. For God’s sake talk. Stop filtering every thought and tell me what’s going through your mind, however random.”

  Okay, Charlotte but be careful what you wish for.

  “Truthfully … since Alison died, I’ve spent more time thinking about Sebastian Fallon and Anthony Nixon than I have about Alison. Every time I try to push them from my mind, it comes back, all the unanswered questions. I even considered, on my way over here, asking you to slap me if I mentioned it, because I just can’t be … can’t be … I don’t know … mentally disciplined over it.”

  “What have you done?” She’d always had this ability to see beneath his words, but this was something else.

  “Have you heard something?”

  She nodded.

  “Aren’t you going to tell me?”

  “No - because then it’ll be ‘who said what, and how do you know them, and what do I think of them, and what do they buy from the pharmacy and what do they do for a living and are they happily married and why were they awake at that time of night anyway … and none of that’s important. What we need to discuss is how you’re feeling, right now, right in this moment.”

  “Out of control.”

  “Good.”

  “What?”

  “That’s exactly how you should be. Don’t you see, you should be acting erratically, people will forgive you. You should be crying and struggling to sleep and trying to distract yourself with the local mystery. It’s all natural - you’ve got to stop being frightened of grief and the effect it's having on you. Time will see the old Daniel return, just be patient and try to stay on the right side of the law in the meantime.”

  A few of those ones and zeros clicked on and off in Daniel’s mind without conscious thought. And the conclusion? Everyone in this backward village knew about him snooping around Fallon’s, probably about him catching that Martin Dalgliesh kid too. But did it matter? He supposed not.

  “I guess I needed that.”

  “What?”

  “Honesty. And to know at least one person’s on my side.”

  “There’s always Ted isn’t there?”

  What sat between them was Charlotte and Edwards’s lack of mutual trust and respect. They kept the veneer of civility for Daniel’s sake.

  “Let’s just say I’m not sure he’s still got my back.” The silence became stale. Daniel guessed Charlotte was avoiding the, ‘told you so’ conversation.

  She got up, “Another coffee?”

  “Why not.”

  As she busied making them, Charlotte raised her voice from the kitchen. “Did Alison have any left?”

  “Any left?” He twisted on the sofa, showing his confused face.

  “Marijuana.”

  “Oh, no. I cleared that out. Threw it in the fire. I heard something fall from the roof when I burned it and thought, for a minute, a seagull had been perching on the chimney, getting high.”

  Charlotte laughed and poured milk.

  The marijuana was a secret between the three of them. Alison had always said that, however bad things became, she would not debase herself by turning to marijuana. She knew that many sufferers did and that, with the right permissions, it was legal. But she was stuck in this paradigm. She’d grown up in the seventies, when people were waking up from the haze of the sixties and the government (not to mention her parents) were
doing all they could to discourage drug-taking. She remembered the message being hammered home at school. And so the thought of taking drugs was, like everything else drubbed into her as a child, unthinkable.

  Still, like a first time expectant mother adamant about a drug-free birth, Alison had been a touch naive. Daniel encouraged her to smoke it. His time as a constable had given him first hand experience of Saturday nights in Scunthorpe town centre, and it wasn’t marijuana causing the women to spit screaming obscenities at their waste-of-space boyfriends, only to be slapped in the street. It was alcohol.

  Dr Bentine had willingly prescribed marijuana, and Daniel remembered Alison smoking it for the first time. She’d coughed briefly, then spread out in her wheelchair - she described ‘every muscle relaxing’. After two further prescriptions, Dr Bentine retired and the local practice must have had an agreement between the remaining GPs: they all refused to prescribe, stating that, ‘NICE say there’s no clinical proof of its efficacy.’ They all trotted out the same line. Alison had become distressed and they went to surgeries outside the village to source it, but got the same story.

  Charlotte heard what was happening and intervened, doing the unthinkable, risking everything to liberate some from the pharmacy’s stocks. She did this over Daniel’s protests, which were - in retrospect - a little weak; he’d have done anything to improve Alison’s situation and knew Charlotte felt the same. Still, this decision haunted them, and - like most guilty secrets - occasionally pricked their collective conscience reminding them that, should anyone find out, the consequences would be dire.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  As the spring came and inevitably rolled into summer, Daniel took Charlotte’s advice, starting with his guitar.

  He forced his fingers to perform scales up and down the strings of his Les Paul, for exactly an hour every day, and by the second week the awkwardness and unfamiliarity was gone. He dusted off his Marshall amplifier (classic half-stack) from the garage. Alison had said it took up too much space in the house, but now stood proud in his study.

  He took the whole of March to loosen up - deliberately postponing the songs he longed to play - making sure that when he ripped those chords in anger, it would sound as good as it once had. On the last day of March at exactly nine p.m., just as the evening news demanded his empty sofa’s attention, he rested the tip of his guitar’s head (shaped like a handlebar moustache) against the amplifier’s Marshall signature. “Tomorrow morning we play.”

  And play he did, tracks of energy and fire: ACDC, Led Zeppelin, Guns N’Roses, Nirvana, Metallica, Green Day and, for the first time in a long time, the heavy blanket of grief was lifting. Better still, his old friend potency had returned.

  Contact between Daniel and Edwards had become civil but perfunctory. Most weeks he’d get a call or a text, asking how he was bearing up. These were usually answered in the same way: ‘I’m getting there.’ During the first week of June, Edwards called him to ask whether Daniel had reconsidered going back to work. Daniel answered honestly that, yes, he had and would take the summer off, returning in September - if they still wanted him. Edwards said he was glad to hear it, that they just needed to do some paperwork, and Daniel’s old job would be his. Their frosty relationship was thawing. There would, of course, be a few review points during the first six months, but - in theory - he would pick up his career where he’d left off.

  Daniel frequently met with Charlotte. Her kids, Kerry a nine-year-old self-confessed nerd and Luke, a seven-year-old who fancied himself as a comedian (and in truth, was pretty damn funny - he’d memorised dozens of one-liners) took to Daniel; a favourite uncle who was down on his luck. Daniel ate with them at least three times a week, insisting on paying an overly generous contribution to the food bill. The extra helped Charlotte keep her head above water. She was a proud woman, but not so proud as to put her kids on the street. She got by.

  As for the deaths of Sebastian Fallon and Anthony Nixon, Daniel’s pre-occupation had faded like post-operative pain; dropping off sharply the first few days after his talk with Charlotte, then lingering in the background until thoughts of Fallon, Nixon and the Dalgliesh kid were entirely absent from his days. And, more importantly, his nights.

  For Jean Nixon the pain did not go away, and neither did her anger at the inquests into her husband and Sebastian Fallon’s deaths. She’d spoken openly in the papers, implacably criticising the verdicts. She had, reluctantly, accepted her husband’s suicide, but protested strongly that her husband wasn’t capable of murder. She’d wanted an ‘unlawful killing’ verdict, bringing into question whether a third party could have been involved, or - failing that - a verdict of manslaughter. DCI Edwards told Daniel that ‘Mrs Nixon was dreaming,’ a murder-suicide conclusion was obvious. Only a fool would doubt it.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Leon Jackson rose from unconsciousness like a free diver hitting the surface, out of air. He gasped as his eyes flicked open, then squinted at the brightness. His pupils contracted. For a moment he thought he was half-immersed in a nightmare; having his teeth extracted by some sick dentist who strapped his patients in then operated without anaesthetic. The phrase ‘Dr Drill’ came to mind and a whimper escaped him.

  His whimpering disturbed something to his right and he heard shuffling, or scurrying like claws on newspaper. He picked up the acidic, dank, earthy scent of untended rodent faeces.

  How the hell did I end up here? Wherever here is. He had no idea. His last recollection was waking up on Sunday morning and making himself and Barbara Spanish omelettes for breakfast.

  He tried to move his arms, but tight, thick leather straps held him, their buckles forming a line down his right side, digging painfully into his ribs and fatty flesh. Another, longer strap ran downwards from his neck-strap’s steel ring, finally looping under his groin and back up underneath him. His feet and hands were the only free parts of his body. He circled them, attempting to release their aches.

  He looked to his right at the rats which paused to stare back at him, their pink claws gripping the grid of their cells, their noses jutting through wire and twitching as if trying to smell the measure of him. He looked to his left. An electric cooker with two empty rings. Next to the cooker, a weighty pestle and mortar sat on a workbench by white, rectangular cardboard packets.

  Leon peered forward, beyond his feet, to a board of pictures: polaroids of scores of other people similarly strapped. There was no pattern to the demographic; a young woman in her twenties, with slack jaw and closed eyes; an old man - the tendons in his neck strained. Struggling to escape. And others … so many others. To the left of the pictures a thick door was ajar. To their right, on a shelf beyond the cages, an old-fashioned polaroid camera.

  Somewhere behind him a faint whining noise was followed by a thud. It sounded like a fridge being closed. Then footsteps which neared. A featureless figure loomed over him from behind, the bright light above shrouding his face in darkness. Fingers came from Leon's left, forcing his eyelid open, pressing his eyeball into its socket as something metallic and mechanical came from his right.

  Leon Jackson’s whimpering rose into a crescendo of shrill screams.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The Crown - Blaine’s only pub - was weird but brilliant. It was the go to place for throwing birthday bashes, watching sports events, singing karaoke and - occasionally - listening to live music. It had a core of regulars who were friendly, at least by small village standards. A stranger - perhaps the rare person who stopped off at Blaine on the way to the coast - could walk into The Crown to a broad smile from Randy the landlord, and to the indifferent turned backs of locals; no gawping at the interloper, Randy wouldn’t have it.

  Randy had been christened Andy. He’d achieved his new handle after an incident which took place one summer’s night, twenty minutes or so after closing time. A disoriented punter (who soon sobered up) had walked down the alley, towards the beer garden, to find Andy with his back to a wall, partially hidden by two
stacks of beer barrels. Less hidden were the two barmaids who were paying him more than a little attention. The following day, everyone had called him Randy and laughed. Andy - now ‘Randy’ - had laughed along (the barmaids in question blushed, but neither appeared mortified) and the name stuck. He was one of those people who cared nothing for his name, his reputation, or worries of any kind. He was commonly heard saying, ‘You’re here for a good time, not a long time.’ This attitude worked for him, no one thought twice about asking him to host his or her ‘knee’s up’. And so, by the time the first wasps of the season were buzzing at Daniel’s conservatory door, he didn’t hesitate; he called Randy, asking if he had any free Friday or Saturday nights, on which Daniel might play at The Crown. Of course, Randy agreed.

  The moment he’d hung up, Daniel felt a sense of trepidation. He hadn’t played in The Crown since Alison’s somewhat optimistic, ‘I don’t want my condition to change your life’ phase. Would he be able to cut it?

  It was a good turnout. Charlotte, as promised, had secured a baby-sitter for the night (Daniel had chipped in because, on Saturday, sitters were like rocking horse shit in Blaine and could charge the earth). She stood on her own, leaning against a beer-ledge a few feet from the un-raised corner Daniel had made his stage. Fake smiles played on her face; discomfort at being Charlotte-no-mates for the night. She was beautiful, in her modest but clinging black dress. It looked like those exercise videos were paying off; she’d put on a little weight since the funeral in all the right places. Daniel always thought that having kids had taken its toll on her, but, as it transpired, Charlotte’s ageing had come from an unhappy marriage. Lately she’d turned the clock back a few years.

  The gig was in the bar. The ‘lounge’ was safely tucked away on the other side of the pub and mostly frequented by those in their eighties who couldn’t abide the bar’s blaring music. The bar was split in two. The half furthest from Daniel had tables, chairs and multiple old, curved-screen TVs, their tops a few inches below the wallpapered ceiling. Sky’s coverage of cage fighting was tastelessly playing on them all. There was something about the silent pictures and lack of commentary, which amplified the violence. The clusters of drinkers, sitting beneath the screens, appeared to pay this brutality no mind as they multitasked: checking their phones whilst somehow engaging in conversation.