by Peter Laws
She smelt very strange and thoroughly unpleasant, like the food scraps bin he had at home under the kitchen sink. When he put them out for collection each week, when they were moist with decay – she smelt of that and maybe a little vinegar. And she was cold beneath him.
For the first time she started making a noise, a quiet moaning while her cold hips started to push against his.
Slowly at first.
Up and around.
Up and around. Dirty Elmo style.
A subtle, sexual writhing that Matt hoped to hell Kwame wouldn’t notice. She was humming a melody. ‘Amazing Grace’.
‘You’ll need to move the knife from her neck. Just for a few seconds, okay?’
Kwame narrowed his eyes. ‘I tell you, Pastor, that I’ll stab you if this don’t work. I’ll cut your bloody throat.’
The indentation in Arima’s neck sprang back as Kwame pulled the knife away.
Matt started to pray aloud, something in Latin. This time he did get a little Heston with it because, frankly, he was nervous. It was a harmless blessing prayer that he’d learnt a million years ago in Bible college but he could already see Kwame starting to relax, clearly thinking Matt was legit. Oh, Bible verses make you look holy but pray in Latin and everyone thinks you’re Max von Sydow in The Exorcist.
After a minute of this, Kwame even took a step backwards, up against the swarming fish tanks. He sank onto one of the benches so he could watch. There was distance between him and his wife, finally.
‘I need you to pray, Kwame. Pray the Lord’s Prayer … right now. And pray loud.’
Hairy hands slapped together, wedging the knife blade between his palms. His eyes closed tight and became a black spiderweb of wrinkles. Arima kept humming the melody of Amazing Grace.
How sweet the sound … that saved a wretch like me.
Okay. This is it.
‘It’s really hot today,’ he whispered towards the earpiece. The agreed code for ‘she’s clear’. Hopefully, the malfunction was only one way and the army of police could still hear him outside.
No response.
He wiggled his face, felt the earpiece shift. ‘It’s really hot today.’
He waited for the doors to burst in.
Nothing.
‘Pray it again, Kwame. Keep going and don’t stop.’
Kwame nodded, closed his eyes again.
Matt took in a breath. New plan.
Just as Kwame’s lips circled to form the ‘ow’ of ‘Our Father’ Matt hollered out as loud as he possibly could. ‘She’s clear!’
It took a split second.
To look back and see the slip of a grateful smile start on Kwame’s face, he must have thought the mystery pastor’s sudden announcement meant he’d actually cleared out the demon and set his wife free. Matt even heard the guy shout hallelujah. But then those huge eyes flung themselves open like two iron doors on a cage and his sweat-soaked face crumbled into confusion. A line of police crashed through the glass front doors and scrambled toward the fish tanks, filling the place with a disorientating rugby team roar, skidding through the soy sauce, barking and shouting, ‘Police! Police! Drop your weapon!’ But they still felt quite a distance away.
Matt went to push himself off Arima so he could get clear but her icy hands suddenly clamped round his wrists. Stronger than she should be, she locked him there for a second. A very long, drawn-out second. Kwame threw himself toward him with a squeal.
He felt a sudden ripple in the back of his neck.
It could have been a draught of air from the now open door, or Kwame dropping onto him with the knife. The tip of the blade plunging at the part the stab vest wasn’t covering.
Oh shit.
The bones in his spine automatically locked themselves into position, like he was a Transformer bracing for impact. He had a sudden flash of an image of himself sitting paralysed in a high-backed chair sipping carrot soup from a spoon from his weeping wife’s trembling hand. So real that he heard his breath shudder.
‘Iiii,’ Kwame from behind, ‘kiiiilll.’
Time slowed the syllables. The officers’ roar was loud, but he could tell it was too far away. The sound of them bent into a low dinosaur growl, every sound dragging, sinking as though the batteries of the world were finally running out.
Instinctively Matt pulled up his knee, wound it like a spring and hammered it backwards. The sole of his shoes (the ones he wore for lecturing and funerals and vicar impersonations) slammed into something – Kwame’s leg, most likely, from the horrible cracking sound. Like a branch snapping underwater. It was followed by frantic crackling as the officers deployed their Tasers. The knife clattered to the floor followed by the jerking crunch of his electrified body. Like all that hair was about to burst into spontaneous combustion.
‘You’re clear, Hunter.’ It was Bob Gerard, panting, laughing. ‘You mad little shit. You’re clear.’
Matt yanked his wrist out from Arima’s hand. But then he stopped.
For the first time her eyes began to open. She did it gradually and, it seemed, with some discomfort. Her lids tore as though they’d been stuck shut with surgical glue. Her lips pressed forward to speak and a black hole slowly split into an open seam between them. What she said made some of his strength drain away.
‘Mama neeeeeeeed.’ Her dry voice crackled like old paper.
‘Mrs Adakay?’ he said.
‘Mama neeeeeeeed.’
It was the strangest thing. He’d never met the woman, never seen her face, never even knew the name Arima was a name before today. But those words hung in the air like a shared secret between the two of them. And when he saw her lips form the shapes and sounds he closed his eyes, as if it might block out the syllables. It didn’t. Arima’s pleading just threw up the image of his own mother against the back of his eyelids. Her matted hair sticky, face down at the kitchen table, voice bubbling into liquid.
Some sadistic little neuron fired in his brain: bet she said that, too. I bet you, I bet you, I bet you …
He shook his head quickly and opened his eyes as Arima said it again. ‘Mama neeeeeed her boy.’ Then a manic look of excitement animated her face.
He ripped his wrists from her hand and sprang to his feet, brushing himself down. Arima was still on the floor but now she started to reach out both hands to him, as though she was pleading for him to crawl back on top of her. Then her eyes grew wide and she opened her mouth to hiss, low and long. He could see the piece of unswallowed lettuce, rattling like a second tongue right at the back of her throat.
‘Mama neeeeeeeeeeeeeeed.’
Why the hell was she smiling?
The medics were shuffling down the corridor, swooping around her.
‘Help her, will you?’ Matt told them, eyes fixed on Arima’s arching back. It was so high that he half expected to hear each vertebrae snap as she contorted, cracking like the flick of a pack of cards.
He needed some air. He dug the earpiece out with shaking fingers and, holding it in his fist, marched through the glass doors and back out onto the pavement.
He spotted a van in the street that hadn’t been there before. Then a TV camera was thrust into his face as soon as his foot touched the tarmac. The street suddenly echoed with sound. It took him a moment to realise it was the officers applauding. They stuck up their thumbs, whistled with delight.
‘Great work, Reverend!’ the reporter said and from somewhere, he heard a woman wolf-whistle. But what he mainly heard was Arima still crying out, even through the glass. Mama, mama, mama neeeeeed. He reached up and yanked the dog collar off his neck, then tossed it into the bin, like a fourteen-year-old hiding a cigarette from his mother, and hurried toward his car.
CHAPTER FOUR
Her smell was on him. Especially, Matt felt, on his face. Like he’d put the recycling out and ended in a comedy slip of carrot ends and onion skins landing on his head. When he breathed in a certain way, he could taste her too.
Arima Aroma, he thought and smiled
for what felt like the first time in hours, finally free of the eternal debrief to the police and reporters, who dragged him back before he’d even reached his car. He buzzed the window down. London air, thick with the Thames, whistled in.
Mama neeeeeeeeeeed …
He blinked hard and grabbed one of his CDs for a distraction. Star Wars: The Original Motion Picture Soundtrack. Yeah, that was nerdy enough to do it. He pushed the disc in. The orchestra’s main theme tore into life, rattling the car. He bobbed his head as he drove.
He checked his watch and winced at the time. Almost three. Crap, he was so late. He pushed his foot into the accelerator and sped for all of five seconds until the next traffic light blinked onto red: ye shall not pass.
‘Damn it.’ As he waited he noticed the little angry breaks in the skin in each of his wrists, caused by Arima’s fingernails. He called out above the music, ‘I think Mama neeeeeeeed a good psychiatrist.’
It didn’t sound as funny out loud.
Even though he’d torn that clerical collar off, he could still feel it pressing around his neck. Those things often used to do that, when he wore them professionally. He’d take it off at night for a shower and still feel it gripping. Like when you wear a hat for a long time and it still feels like it’s there. A phantom frigging limb, that’s what it was. He felt pretty stupid but even now he had to check in the rear-view mirror just to make sure he really had dragged it off.
Dog collar. Whoever thought that name up had an excellent grasp of irony.
There was a time in his life when he’d worn one constantly.
Back in his early twenties, when he’d been the obedient, house-trained minister of Bewley Hill Independent Evangelical Church (a long-winded name for a long-winded church). He’d unlock the doors at 9 a.m. at least, setting out chairs because there were no pews. There wasn’t any art (cos that was evil and sensuous), no golden candlesticks (cos that symbolised greed) and no altar to put them on (cos that was … heaven forfend! … too Catholic). Bewley was village hall-style spirituality. It was No-Frills, Everyday Value, Waitrose Essentials Protestantism, thank you very much.
What that church did have was a Godzilla-sized version of the King James Bible on a folding wooden table, surrounded by canvas chairs with cold metal frames. Oh, it was the very cutting-edge of spiritual expression, in around 1692. He’d set those chairs out only after battling with the temperamental heating system, which never worked cos God’s saving his heat for hell!: the hilarious recurring joke of the church secretary.
Then he’d have to figure out the angles on the stubborn/Satanic overhead projector. He’d be slipping newssheets into Bibles and stacking them neatly. Shivering in the rain while putting up laminated A-board posters of that morning’s sermon title. And picking up the cans and used condoms strewn around the church steps, paranoid that he’d feel the prick of a syringe.
Then the service would begin and he’d be up there for an hour, preaching a thirty-minute sermon and belting out four hymns. Two modern, two traditional, always trying to keep the balance. While he tried to seem approachable and authoritative, unique and ordinary all at the same time. And throughout it all, he’d be praying for the healing of the world.
He shuddered in the car at the thought of it. Literally shuddered. In the same way Terry Waite probably freaked out if he ever accidentally woke up in some deep dip of the night and thought he was back in his hole.
Matt touched his fingertips to his bare neck one more time and smiled. Nothing there. And there was no creepy cross hanging from the rear-view mirror, like he used to have. No little hand-held Eucharist box stuffed in his glovebox so he could take communion to the shut-ins, with bite-sized bread and a tiny bottle of wine for pensioners who liked their gluten-free Jesus to go.
He pushed the car into gear as the lights turned green. As good a symbol as any that he really was free and life was good. And while his writing and speaking and teaching at the university showed that religion was still his bread and butter, there was now a crucial difference. He didn’t have to actually eat that bread. Sniff it? Yeah, why not? Prod it a bit, like an interesting mushroom growing on a tree? Fine.
But consume it? Uh-uh. Cos that stuff did things to people. Bad things.
He could tell he was getting nearer to his house because gangs of youths started to shimmer out of the concrete, with hoods up like medieval monks with ASBOs, then he pulled into his turning. It was called Cropsy Road, a Victorian terrace of three-storey houses. His had a bright-red door, which he’d painted last November on a Turner Classic Movie-inspired whim. The sort where Ebenezer Scrooge might swing his head out of the windows and shout Merry Christmas.
Only Scrooge didn’t walk fifty yards to the end of his street to a nightclub called Hedonism and a strip of sticky-floor pubs and kebab shops. These delights had appeared about six months after they’d bought this house and sunk all their savings into it. Bad timing, that.
Turns out that when you stick a few prostitutes on the corner and a gang of hoodies by the front gate it works a dark magic on a house’s price tag. Add the fact that Wren might be redundant from her architects’ firm in three weeks, they’d probably be stuck here for another year, despite his own income.
One day, if the finances were right, the Hunter family would keep on driving and push through the outer force fields of London. They’d live in one of those Buckinghamshire villages that Wren kept bugging him about. He’d finally finish the book he was writing and work for a leafy college somewhere. Life would involve picking the kids up from school and drinking obscure ales with Wren each night at quaint pub quizzes, where he’d floor the competition on the Bible and Star Trek rounds. Not sports, though. Never sports. But maybe he’d take up running again.
Yeah, that’d work just fine.
He parked and headed up his path, his little souvenir NASA key fob dangling from his hand. When he stepped into the hallway he saw Wren was halfway down the stairs, dragging a huge suitcase behind her.
Thud. Thud! Thud!
‘Whoah.’ He rushed over. ‘Let me help.’
She aimed a palm at him, stopped him dead. Then she yanked the case down the final step and curled a lock of her bright-red hair behind each ear. She looked at him. Or rather, she aimed her eyes at him. Both barrels.
‘Well, would you look at this. I figured I’d go all trad and do the packing by myself.’
‘Wren, I’m sorry I’m so late.’
‘And we all know how much Wren Hunter loves packing.’ She held a finger gun to her head and pulled the trigger. Then she hooked a thumb at her face. ‘Best. Wife. Ever.’
‘Undeniably.’
‘Stop smiling.’ She pulled a long breadstick from her back pocket and chomped down hard on it. She often carried them around like that, and he could never fathom how they didn’t snap. ‘I called ahead. I told Seth that we’re going to be late. Great start to my business pitch, this is.’
‘Look, I’m really sorry. I got called in on something. Police stuff.’
‘Again?’ She snapped the stick theatrically between her teeth. ‘Book writing getting tedious, is it, Professor?’
He took a step closer. ‘I saved a woman’s life today.’
Her shoulders dropped and she started dragging her suitcase down the hallway. ‘Don’t tell me that.’
‘Seriously. I saved an actual person’s actual life today.’ He grabbed a couple of cases and dragged them with her.
She let out a long, lip-flapping breath as she dumped it by the door, ‘And how the heck am I supposed to complain about that?’
‘You can’t. That’s the genius of it.’
She gazed at the black shirt and trousers. ‘And how come you’re dressed like a waiter?’
‘I’ll explain later.’ He checked the clock on the wall. ‘Look, I’ll quickly get changed and then I’ll start loading up.’
Wren nodded, cupped her hand around her mouth and called up the stairs, ‘Girls. We’re going.’ The obligatory pause. T
hen both of them called up at the same time.
‘Girls!’
Muffled music suddenly stopped upstairs.
‘Crud,’ Wren said. ‘I haven’t locked the windows. I’ll do that and you load up.’
He nodded, and she sprang off on her usual pre-holiday security detail. Windows locked, timer lights set, Radio 4 on low but constant – so burglars pressing their ears to the windows would think the house was occupied … by posh people discussing garden weeds and Klimt.
As she headed into the kitchen Matt went to grab the final case and saw Lucy at the top of the stairs, looking down at him. She had the usual expression whenever she deemed him worthy of a glance. One raised eyebrow, a horizontal line for a mouth. Sixteen years old and already a master at the cold glare shut-out.
‘Hi, Lucy.’
She clomped down the stairs, then when she was sure her mother wasn’t in earshot she tilted her head. ‘Hello, Matthew.’
The sound of his first name dangled on a string between them. And she smirked at whatever power she thought it gave her. He’d read a magazine at the dentist’s once that said the ‘first name gambit’ (sounded like a chess move) was often used against stepdads. Goes with the territory, so to speak.
‘Come on. Help me load up the car.’
‘What’s with the black get-up?’ She nodded at his clothes. ‘You been serving at a pizza restaurant or something?’
He laughed. God, her and Wren were alike. ‘Actually I’ve been puppeteering for local orphans.’
She looked at him like he was a maniac.
Another voice suddenly squeaked from upstairs and he felt his heart lift. It was Amelia: ‘Can we take my telescope?’
She was leaning over the bannister with a box under her arm, beaming a smile and nodding her head like an eager dog. She waved her hand across the air for a Jedi mind trick. ‘You will take the telescope, Father. It is … your destiny.’