by LK Fox
She seemed to be apologising. She was bending over me, looking warily into my face. I think she expected me to jump up and attack her. The pain in my chest pinned me to the ground with a hot spike. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think.
I thought, I am dying in a small, neglected part of a run-down city park, here where Gabriel and I used to play hide and seek on overcast Sunday afternoons.
I thought if I could twist my head in the wet grass I might see him excitedly push his way out of the bushes. I might see him one last time before I died.
For a minute there was perfect calm and silence.
Then the sounds rushed back and the world came alive again and my breath returned in a sickening rush.
I moved so quickly she had no time to get out of range. I grabbed her right ankle and pulled her over, then scrambled to my feet, lifting her and slamming her body against the trunk of the oak tree behind us.
Horrified, I looked down upon myself, holding her there with my hands around her throat, watching her feet kick. The sound of her rasping breath, the noise of rain falling into the tops of the branches. I thought about staying there until her heart stopped beating. Then I could drop her and simply walk away.
She was staring wildly into my eyes, wondering how I could have survived. She couldn’t have known about the one thing I had taken with me from Datachase. The mildew-smelling padded vest, taken from our store room on the one and only time I went out into the field with the police. The impact of the slugs had hurt like hell, but it had stopped them. I was bleeding, though. One of the bullets had missed the vest and passed through the top of my left arm.
I tried to take the gun from her, but she wouldn’t loosen her grip. It twisted and kicked back. The bullet caught her in the arm. She fell from my grip and landed beside me, spattering me in her blood.
As I got to my feet. I kept her in my line of vision, trying to imprint her face on my eyes. I needed to remember everything in order, to keep it imprisoned inside for ever, next to the image of my son. I was going to walk away, but I couldn’t leave her like that.
Between angry bursts of rain, I managed to haul her barely conscious body out of the garden. The grey BMW was parked outside the observatory, but I encountered a problem. I couldn’t get into it. I mean, I had the keys, but knowing that Gabriel had died in the back seat made me feel sick.
Ella seemed unaware of where she was. I asked her where she wanted to go but got no answer, so I forced myself to get into the car and headed to her flat.
I took the pistol and told her that I would get rid of it. There was no need to involve the police now, or ever again. There was no more damage that could be done. I felt bad about leaving her, but she insisted. I wanted to know if she was going to be all right – a strange thing to ask someone who’s just shot you. At the doorway, she collapsed, and I carried her to the couch in the living room. I made her hot tea and she hugged me, making my blackened chest sting. I thought that she gripped me so tightly because it was over, because she would never be haunted again. I left her the dragoon. After all, it belonged to her.
On the way home, I headed down to the embankment and threw the gun into the Thames, where it presumably settled in the silt among all the other weapons that had been hurled into the river over the years.
Ella
I’ve shot him, I thought. The gun works. I was surprised. I thought they only worked like that in films.
I stepped further into the watery light so that he could see me properly now, but he didn’t seem able to focus. The blood on his shirt looked as black as oil.
My eyes are weak in half-light, and it was pretty dark all around us. I wanted to study his face, to see if there was anything that remained of his old self, but he looked so different now that I could barely recognise anything about him. As Nick turned his head and looked at me, a wood pigeon battered its way through the branches above, making us both start.
The strange thing about following people is that you’re always convinced they can see you, but most of the time they don’t notice a thing. I had never been very far apart from him. Never. And today I had managed not to let him out of my sight.
I wanted to know, but wasn’t sure if he could still speak. ‘Do you remember what you did to me that night?’
I was standing very close to where he lay now. He simply said, ‘I remember now.’ That was all. Then he turned his face to one side. Out of shame, or pain, or misery.
I couldn’t be sure, but I like to think, at that moment, he recalled everything. He saw the ridiculously naïve, optimistic schoolgirl his singer had scarred with a thrown bottle, the make-up-caked teenager he’d drunkenly molested, the angry girl who had waited outside his house in the rain, the barely visible one who haunted the edges of his life, the one in the coffee shops and bars and stations. I was every woman who had been ignored and looked through and stepped around because there was nothing there to draw others in, not sex or wealth or power or glamour. I’m sure he saw it all. He knew who I was. He had to know.
I had finally become visible. I was a girl again, with a hopeful heart and a good soul, someone to whom none of this should ever have happened.
I reached down and tilted his head back. I needed him to keep his eyes on me. I wondered if I wanted to kill him. Perhaps it was the only way to make everything stop.
There are as many kinds of love as there are ways of dying. It’s a wonder they don’t coincide more often. I stood and watched him. Of course, I watched. That’s what I did. I never participated in life, I was just an observer, a witness to everyone else’s story. As for Buck, now that his dirty work was done, he could disappear for good.
I’d been carrying some kind of weapon with me ever since I was a teenager. I had bought the gun from some hipster kid at the Tequila Sunrise Café. He used to come in wearing a holster as a fashion accessory, and I asked him if he had a gun to go with it. It turned out he did, but he was going home to live at his mum’s for a while and couldn’t take it home so I said I’d buy it from him.
Maybe there’s not enough good luck in the world to go around, and it just gets parcelled out to those who deserve it. That was why Nick got more than his fair share. I’d fired at him three times and, although he was knocked back, he didn’t die.
He attacked me.
My arm hurt. I lay back on the grass as the world turned once more, ensuring that nothing could be brought back. Each moment of dying light moved us further apart. My shoulder was wet and beginning to ache. I couldn’t feel my fingers. I could hear Nick gasping and coughing. From the corner of my eye, I could see another pigeon sitting on a branch, twisting one orange eye my way, then another.
Nick leaned over my shoulder and tried to staunch the flow of blood, but I pushed his hand away.
‘Let me,’ he said. ‘Look, what I did – I would never have harmed him—’
He raised his hand, saving us both from any further embarrassment. ‘I know how much you loved him, Ella.’
‘My name is Elizabeth,’ I said. I preferred the full name, but my mother had always called me Ella. I’d been called lots of other things. Iza, Beth, Lisbeth, Betty ‒ everything but the name I wanted. Elisabeth sounded like a complete person.
I didn’t want to be saved. After a while, it stopped hurting so much and just felt very cold. I knew that even if I died in the next few moments I would be all right, because he had seen me. I existed at last. I was no longer invisible.
I felt the chill of a breeze on my neck. And an extraordinary scent of roses, as vivid as the earliest childhood memory. I couldn’t imagine where it was coming from at this time of year.
I had told so many lies I didn’t know who I was any more. But maybe that was a good thing. As I lay there, I dreamed about a fresh start. I no longer wanted to be an observer, always hiding inside other identities. All that time, there was only one person I ever really wanted to be.
The mother of my child.
I wished I could see Gabriel waiting for me in
the long, wet grass, holding out his scarred hand, his palm upturned to catch the rain. My little boy blue. I’d done so many terrible things. I had killed the only person I ever truly loved. I didn’t deserve any kind of happiness for myself.
Then, out of the shadows, there was joy.
He was standing there, right in front of me. The grass glowed around him, frosted with emeralds. He was looking down at me, puzzled but unafraid, his hair matted and tousled. He was taller and thinner in the face than I remembered, but he was my son – and he was alive.
Gabriel said something. He wanted to take me home. He seemed indistinct and not quite sure of where he was, but I could see he remembered me. When he asked where I had been, I started crying again. I hugged him, checking for marks of harm, but apart from being a little pale he seemed in good health, as if the whole terrible experience had left no damage at all. He had survived, and he had come back to me.
We left the park together, he and I, and I knew that nothing could ever hurt us again.
I looked back at Nick. He seemed so sad and confused now that I almost felt sorry for him. He was the one who’d been lied to most of all. My part in his history was over, but there was something that Nick could do, something he had to learn for himself. It was this:
It was obvious that Nick still didn’t understand. Ben Summerton was the only person who could give him the proof he needed about where his son had come from. I hoped he got it. My part in his life was over.
Nick
Winter settled in, the wettest since records began. The new glass towers in the city looked as if they had been carved from glistening grey shale. Prices were soaring. Business wasn’t great. I started to think about getting out of the city.
It was still raining when Ben and I met for the final time. He’d been working in Los Angeles, setting up an office there, but spent a week every month in a rented flat in London. We agreed to meet on neutral territory, in a half-empty, bare-brick, once-fashionable bar overlooking the river, stripped-pine tables and blackboard menus, bland gastropub food. Safe ground. Water pearled across the diamond-pattern windows, catching the river’s light.
In his sharp grey business suit, he looked freakishly glossy and fresh. Los Angeles clearly suited him, even with his appalling Californian-executive haircut. He sat opposite me, twisting a packet of sweetener between his tanned, perfectly manicured fingers, waiting for me to begin.
I had gone there to tell him everything I knew, but before I began there was only one question that I really wanted him to answer truthfully. It was something that had been preying on my mind.
I watched his face. There was no tilt of his features that I didn’t know but, right then, I could not tell what he was thinking. He took out a cigarette and tapped it on the pack.
I frowned. ‘You don’t smoke.’
‘Not much. One or two a day. I never told you.’
‘I have to ask you one thing, Ben. It’s very important to me that you’re completely honest about this.’
He looked up, returning my gaze, but his thoughts remained shuttered from me.
I said, ‘Where did your son come from?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I think you know exactly what I mean.’
He released the faintest of sighs, as if he had always been expecting the question.
‘Was he yours?’
He studied my face carefully, and I waited for an answer. He parted his lips as if to speak, but stopped himself. Eventually, he sighed and shook his head. ‘I don’t see what difference it makes, or what it has to do with this.’
‘How did Gabriel get the scar on his hand?’
‘At first I thought it was a birthmark. But I was told it wasn’t.’
It was his first admission. ‘Why did you and Kate adopt?’
He looked out of the window at the rain stippling the river. ‘She thought it would save us.’
‘So she couldn’t have children of her own?’
‘She was worried about giving birth to a child with a heart defect. There was a genetic history in her family and she was a Catholic; she would never have an abortion. I never wanted a child in the first place. I went along with the adoption because I thought it might help to stabilise her when I—’ He stopped.
‘When you left. You already knew the truth about yourself.’
‘The adoption didn’t help. She soon found out that her new boy was a little different from other kids. She dangled toys in front of him and his eyes didn’t follow them. He’d squirm whenever she tried to hold him. No matter how hard she tried, he just – refused to connect with her.’
I thought of Gabriel in his bed with the dragoon stitched on to his blanket. And Ella standing in gardens, looking through doors, a silhouette against the light, her maternal presence never far away.
Kate Summerton had never realised the competition she’d faced.
‘She began shutting him out. She just couldn’t handle him.’ Ben studied the unlit cigarette. ‘At the time she died, she was taking all kinds of medication. And I was going through problems of my own.’
‘Your sexuality.’
‘Something like that.’
‘It took you a long time to realise.’
‘No, I’d always known. I’m very good at avoidance.’
‘Ben, I need to tell you something.’
He looked into my eyes and waited. With a sixth sense, the waiter who had been standing nearby moved away so that we were by ourselves.
I said, ‘I was Gabriel’s natural father.’
Ben’s look turned into a stare, frozen and unblinking. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’
I shrugged. I didn’t know what else to say.
‘How?’ he asked. ‘How could that be?’
That was when I told him the whole story, of who I had been and what I could remember about what I had done. When I had finished, I waited for some kind of response, but none came. Ben just sat and stared into his empty coffee cup, suddenly looking less confident and West Coast and a lot more awkwardly English.
‘Don’t you have anything to say?’ I asked.
He looked into my eyes. ‘Why didn’t anyone stop it from happening?’
‘None of us understood what was going on,’ I replied. ‘How could we have done anything?’
‘I remember the first time I brought Gabriel to meet you. How easily you took to him. Most of the men I’d met didn’t want anything to do with a kid.’ He put the cigarette back in its pack, thinking. ‘I’m different now, Nick. When we lost Gabriel, I lost you at the same time. You always made me feel like I wasn’t a good father. Now I know why.’
‘It was never my intention to make you feel that way.’
He pushed back his chair and rose. ‘Of course not. And let me guess. You had sympathy for this psycho girl.’
‘She went through seven years of hell. I thought that was enough.’
Our time together was coming to an end. Ben looked pointedly at his watch. ‘What are you going to do now?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know. I can’t stay where I am. Maybe I should work for a children’s charity. There are other ways of being a good father.’
He suddenly looked tired. ‘I need to get some sleep. I’m heading back to California early in the morning. I’ll be back in a few weeks.’
‘Are you seeing anyone?’
‘What? No, I’m in LA. You don’t “see” people in LA. Anyway, I spend my life on planes. The company has an apartment in Docklands and another in Manhattan. But you should be with someone. You’re that type. A family man.’
He didn’t suggest getting together again, which suited me fine. I rose and shook his hand uncomfortably, waiting until he’d left the bar before I set off.
I walked back along the edge of the river. I watched the rain falling on the olive tide, the blue bulbs in the trees of the South Bank, the paving stones greened with too much water. I stood there and let my memories of Gabriel pass out into the tide.
I saw how easy it had been for Ben to avoid the truth. To omit telling me Gabriel’s true history. There was a lot about him that I didn’t understand. You can’t know everything about a person, and there are things you can never know. Everyone deserves a little privacy. But I was glad I wouldn’t see him again. It felt as if a weight had finally lifted from me.
Somewhere on the river walkway, I heard a child laugh. I stopped and looked back. A small boy with sparkling lights in his trainers was running to catch up with his parents. When he managed to link his hands in theirs once more, they lifted him off the ground and swung him back and forth, and he laughed again.
From somewhere along the reaches of the river came a distant rumble of thunder. As I walked, I looked up at the new blocks of flats that had risen beside the river and wondered how many of them held secrets more devastating than ours.
I didn’t mean to cry. But I did this time, howling at the sky in the black waters, and it felt right.
I thought about Gabriel.
Dad, do the thing for me, the thing your dad taught you.
I couldn’t remember when he first started calling me Dad. His eyes looked like mine. When he smiled, it was my smile. In my heart, I had always known that he was my son.
Perhaps I had known it from the very first time I saw him.
He had opened my eyes to loving someone, and he was here with me now. The boy lived on inside my head and, whenever I saw him, I saw the invincible child in me.
So long as I am alive, one spark of love will always exist for Gabriel. Love has to be unconditional, and it makes you fearless.
Epilogue
Another year had passed, another anniversary. Gabriel would have been nine. What had happened in that time? I really can’t remember. I couldn’t get a job in a theatre company so I got a job as a carer in a children’s nursery. And I started watching Nick again.