Walker was quiet then, back inside the flyer, trying to reach for some time long ago where he briefly held Rose and she him. Green watched him and finally felt some empathy for this monster, and some understanding of Red’s power too. Walker had kept the flyer the way other people kept photos in their wallet, as if by holding on to something physical, something tangible, you could somehow make a two-way street out of love – send it away and someday it might come back to you. But you were just chasing empty shadows down, running into walls, forever calling the memories back, because that’s all they were now; memories. And memories don’t care, thought Green, that’s why he strangled his; slowly suffocated them until they were gone.
‘What happened to you?’ asked Green; it was less the detective talking, just two men now: the night outside falling towards them. I could drink, thought Green, right now, I could open a bottle and pour it down my throat and not care about the consequences; damn the morning, damn the shape tomorrow takes.
‘It was fine at first, you know?’ said Walker in a voice that Green had not heard before. ‘She teased that she could take me away from the dark side, bring me into the light, and for a while that was all right, the promise that things might change, that I could be the way she wanted.’ He was pacing back and forth now, agitated, his shoulders hunched, he was a picture of furious concentration. The malice, thought Green, it rose up underneath him like a sudden riptide, his fingers tightened like he was holding on for dear life or strangling the breath out of someone else.
‘It was good, you know, the way all these things are in the beginning,’ said Walker; his tone was genial, this was the abstract, the way in which men address each other, they could have been talking sports or politics or about distant wars, there was much nodding, murmured assent, the occasional flicker of eye contact, total agreement, shared memories, they were addressing the past but here in the now with half-gestures, mute and gentle gesticulation; masculine shorthand.
‘We’d go to dinner a lot, she liked Italian, seafood too,’ said Walker, colouring in the outline that Red was to Green. ‘She was odd, she had this whole country bumpkin shtick going on, it was a role she was playing, I guess, but she knew her power, she knew she was beautiful. If you’d only got one real look at her, got the chance to soak it all up, take it all in, it was like staring into the sun, but you couldn’t look away. You only saw the hollowed-out shell, the aftermath, when the divine spirit had departed the body. That was how she spoke, “the divine spirit”, what bullshit.’
Green stared at him, fascinated by the sudden rise and fall of his moods, the abrupt stabbing anger, then the strange childlike hurt in his eyes. Always on the edge, thought Green, but never able to quite let himself be free, never able to leap into the abyss of the unknown; he looked like he might cry when he talked about Red and then as if realising that might reveal too much of himself, of the man, he lashed out, but only so that his feelings might be contained, that everything be bottled up, an impassive face for an outside world trying to look in. Just a boy, thought Green, forever thirteen, always caught on the spokes of time.
‘She wanted,’ said Walker, ‘someone just like you, strong, silent, pure of heart. Clothes maketh the man, right?’ Unable to hide the smallest of sneers, he pulled at the ruddy red-black and bloody stain that covered the lapel of Walker’s jacket. ‘So what does your off-the-peg attire make me? Am I more of a man now, more the kind of guy Rose could be happy with? The sort of man she might take on?’
Green couldn’t tell if his tone was mocking or something more fragile, as if Walker were compressing the words together and that way they might never fall apart. There was no space in his sentences to let emotion in or out, it was a hard-driven mantra, Green imagined this scenario had played out before if only in Walker’s head. This was prepared, something he needed to be heard. Maybe this really was the last will and testament that he’d spoken of.
‘There’s a point in your life, any life,’ said Walker, it was getting late, the cars passed less frequently on the highway, the unhurried silence of night moving towards another morning, a new day was coming, ‘where you are the story – do you know what I mean, Green?’ Green was quiet, he didn’t.
‘No imagination, Detective!’ said Walker, but he was smiling a strangely toothy grin, a predatory, mad-eyed face filled with extremes. ‘Let me tell you a story, everyone has their story, even you, are you sitting comfortably, then I’ll begin.’
He looked hysterical then; Green tensed for the impact of attack, but it was as if Walker didn’t even see him anymore, he was addressing the room now. ‘A successful, handsome polymath, a gifted man, our hero,’ said Walker, talking to the roof beams, ‘meets and falls in love with a beautiful redhead, a country girl at heart all alone in the big city, she, and I’m condensing it for you here, Green, no one likes a show-off, right? Anyway, she tries to save him, but he’s a guy, he doesn’t even think he needs saving, he doesn’t see the heartache he’s caused, the pain he’s visited on the world, the murderous deeds he’s committed.’
Green started at the words, but Walker’s fervour was undiminished, he was a man moved to impart his story, he had his tale to tell.
‘Because this man, no matter what you might think, he started out as a good man, his intentions were pure, his heart was in the right place, he wasn’t like his old man, he wanted to help people, not obscure their vision, not blind them to all the pain in the world, because life’s pain, Green? You can’t hide all your life, the world isn’t black and white, it’s a spectrum of colours, it’s abstract, sometimes it’s joy and sometimes it’s just pain. Look who I’m telling that to, Detective Green, a man covered in the blood and misdeeds of others, I don’t know how you carry that around with you, how you trudge ever forward day after day.’
Walker stopped then as if to take Green fully in for the first time. It was as if he could see the darkness that surrounded him, the stink of death and disappointment, the anger and dismay that soaked through his clothes until they touched and tattooed his very skin, until they became a part of him.
‘Most men couldn’t stay standing under the weight of things that you’ve seen, Green, but somehow you keep going, like a silent, steel ship churning through deep waters, you’re almost eerie.’ Walker gave a tilt of his head. ‘No offence, Detective, but you’re hard to make out, the man within is almost invisible sometimes.’ Walker paused as if to collect his thoughts, to realign the ideas in his head.
‘But where was I? So, our hero is desperate not to repeat the misdeeds of his dad, he always wanted to try to help people, show them the truth, but you know, Green, people don’t want to hear the fucking truth, they want to be blinkered and coddled, deliberately misled. And this upset our hero more than our hero might like to admit and so he ploughed the same singularly self-serving, incredibly profitable furrow like his old man had and his old man before that. And he let something black and hard fill up the space where his heart had been.
‘I was bad kid, Green, I won’t deny that, but I thought there might have been redemption in my work, that I might have somehow clawed my way back, but when there’s nothing left of you to save, then how could I have possibly ever been saved? Do you think karma got me, that after the evil I rained down on Blue and those people then things could never be right for me again? You can’t repay those kinds of universal debts, I guess. There was nowhere to go, Rose couldn’t help me, I was beyond help by the time she came along.’
Walker was quiet, assimilating and re-assimilating the roadblocks and dead ends that made up his mind. He’d spent his life running metaphorical stop signs until he’d run out of road to raise hell on. He’d come to rest, to understand introspection and what it really meant. He’d finally been able to see and hadn’t liked the reality, clarity wasn’t for him; he liked his vision muddied and bloody. He enjoyed the blurred, soft edges where he could get away with murder.
‘That’s what Rose gave me,’ he said. ‘A way of seeing, but it turns out I was
just like those people who didn’t want to hear the truth, when it came down to it, I wanted to be blind, just like the rest of them. Our hero was as scared of truly seeing himself as much as the next man, not much of a hero, I guess. I bet you don’t flinch at your reflection, do you, Green? I bet you don’t panic slightly every time you go to shave. And so this sweet country girl found she couldn’t help our hero, she saw him for what he was and she knew there was no goodness to be found there, no way through to reach the light. Especially when there was no light.
‘I have this theory, bear me out, I’ll be done soon.’ Walker paused. ‘That thing I said earlier about being the story at a given point in your life, it goes like this. I think we’re all just stories in other people’s lives, and for a while people want to read that story, whether it’s because they love or hate you or you’ve been thrown together through circumstance, people like us, Green, and those stories begin and those stories end, people stop reading you, they put you down, they riffle through your pages, but one day you’re not the story anymore, that make sense? Rose stopped reading me, she put me down; she closed the book.’
Green knew exactly what he meant and wished he didn’t.
‘I’ve described an arc,’ said Walker. ‘The story has moved on, my story has moved on, it’s ended. Once we’re the story and then we are not the story, stop me if I’m getting too metaphysical for you.’ There was that wild-eyed grin again.
‘You and your family, you were the story; that was your narrative and then your son he was no more, and then your marriage was no more and for you that story had ended. The commune, Blue, Bulley, Alejandro, Henry, did you believe that fuck? That she would even fuck someone like him? She saw something in him that she could never see in me.’
Walker’s face reddened, somewhere between loathing and loss. ‘You met him – what was in there, what did she see in that neurotic lump? I was happy to hang him from that tree like a star at Christmas.’
Green couldn’t help himself: ‘Billy, that was you too?’
Walker was only half-listening. ‘Alejandro, the pretty boy who tried to fly,’ he said. ‘Billy was one of ours, yes, do you know he thought she and I were married? We snatched him from the street – the confusion, the puzzlement on his face. He was on his way to meet Rose, did you know that, Detective? After Billy and I had talked it out, I went and sat outside the bar they were to meet at and watched her wait for him. I might be imagining it, but I thought I saw frustration, anger and then resignation on that pretty face of hers. Love’s like that, isn’t it?
‘And then Alejandro always trailing behind her like a lovelorn puppy, I …’ Walker was quiet, as if now puzzled by his decision to have his men kick Alejandro from this world and into the next.
‘You saw something of yourself there,’ said Green. ‘Waiting unloved alone in a bar, that was your place there at Red’s side. You wanted her so badly, mystified that she didn’t want you, that even the threat of someone else being her desperate shadow was more than you could stomach. So you made him one of your disappeared too; you’re pathetic, a fucking kid who chose to strong-arm his way through the world.’
Walker flushed pink; it would have looked like blushing if it had been anyone else, but he was starting to burn now, the flames licking at his shoulders and neck, threatening to engulf both shoulders. Though his voice was even, stilled among the jumbled edges of his rage.
‘I did for all of them,’ said Walker. ‘I was their full stop, and as for Rose, we wrote her final chapter after she closed the book on me, and now together, Green, you and me, we’re writing these final words, these ideas etched on a page somewhere and who will read that story, Green, how soon will you and I be forgotten, who will be the last person to turn our page, to see these characters locked together? One’s outcome intertwined with the other’s, neither of us can end his story until the other has finished his. One of us has to stop, one of us has to be stopped.’
Walker looked hard at Green, the black of his pupils enlarging until they seemed to become the whole of his eyes. He was ranting now; his voice was strangled, flecks of spit traced his ever-reddening lips; he was, thought Green, as close to unkempt as he was ever going to be. His madness had unravelled him, he was upended; he looked as if he’d actually been shaken. His face was fully red now, his eyes oily pools, glassy and enraged.
‘She wanted me to see the light,’ said Walker. ‘Her light, bathe in it, and I flew too close, like a dizzy moth around a bulb, a Greek fable falling from the sky. I got burned and fell, Rose cast me out, Green, and then my story was told and I was done.’ He stopped and stared. ‘And then I snuffed that light out, her story, it had to end.’
And then, suddenly, Green was looking into that light, could feel it burning his skin, it was as if the sun shone bright and fierce, like someone had tethered it as a giant balloon just feet from the warehouse roof. Hard beams of white coming through the unfinished walls and ceiling; Green imagined floodlights blossoming at an early-evening football game, his father waving from the bleachers. The light hitting the sea at the beach when he was a kid, making the water look glassy and impenetrable, he fought hard not to shade his eyes, the sunshine caught in the explosion of heavy droplets as the spray of white water scattered against the sky and into the endless reach of blue beyond that as he waded into deeper water. And then as if he’d suddenly broken the surface like a shark bearing down on its prey, Walker was there to meet him.
Later, Green would remember that moment and wonder at the loss of blood, the ferocious impact, the dull sound the metal bar made as it hit his arm and his ribs and caused a small firework display to go off at the corner of his right eye as it glanced off his temple. Though the attack was sudden, there was a clarity to that moment; he saw, he swore to himself, Red in the room, she was a blaze of light bleaching the corner of the warehouse, the place where he’d first seen her bloody and broken. She was still, her hair moving slowly, undulating, as if she were trapped underwater, its ghostly movement lifting her lilting copper coils towards the high, broken ceiling. Moments before the first blow, he’d looked past Walker, who was still entranced by his own words, by the speech he was making, and Red, he swore, turned to look at Green, she was all bleached bones and crystal green eyes and she mouthed one word to him: ‘Run.’ But then, as if he had also heard her instruction, Walker too was running hard and into Green, they both exhaled, the air leaving them in an explosive burst.
‘This story ends.’ Walker was gasping, but he was calm, his fury contained. Green knew how much harder it was to fight someone who was in control of themselves and for all of Walker’s demented rhetoric, he was here now, intent on seeing this through. This is what Green thought as they grappled together, entwined figures falling quickly to the floor. Dust rose and settled on their contorted features, Green felt his own dried blood on the jacket that Walker had stolen from him, it brushed up against his face as he reached around to punch Walker in the kidneys and tried to bite him through his cheek. They were a tangle of legs and thighs, intimate in this colluded violence, heads butting at each other, each trying to find a foothold so they could somehow start to finish this, spectral fingers of the coming sun set as brands across their backs.
‘Naughty,’ chided Walker, but his face was pale and there was a scratch near his eye, a pulsing red trail already turning to a bloody bruise.
And there they were, these two men locked together for a moment, two stories being told then if only to the other. Green had wrested the iron bar away and now it lay like a promise mere feet from their scuffling forms. Green imagined Red standing nearby, remote now and forever removed from them both. He wondered at how he had made this so personal a vendetta; if this bloody conclusion was his way back to the world, back to feeling again. And then he thought how far he’d fallen, about the path his father had chosen, brief, fleeting moments, his wife Nancy’s long forgotten face, an image he’d locked away and hidden so deeply that not even he knew where it was buried anymore. And his b
eautiful boy: that moment of life caught like something seen and unseen as quickly as a face flashing by from the window of a moving train, there and then gone. And in that moment, his old world falling upward and away from him, long after he’d gone as far down as he could possibly go, Louis Green decided to get up.
He wrestled one hand free and jammed both his fingers into Walker’s eyes and pushed hard. He felt the give in both eyeballs, the lids trying to close around his fingers as if that might deter them, the sudden twist of panic in Walker’s body, the surprised gasp.
‘Cunt,’ said Walker, trying to wrest his body away even as Green was clambering on top of him, pressing him down hard into dusty concrete of the warehouse floor. Green thought of Red lying here once, Walker standing above her wielding a piece of wood, his men unflinching and remote, waiting for another atrocity to be completed so they could start the car, escape the cold and make it back to the city. It had taken one blow to her head, Red spinning with a sudden smear at her temple, the blood running into her ear, a small grunt of confused pain; she saw Walker dissolve and then steady and then dissolve again, called out to the empty skies and was gone before Walker’s tears had landed to stain the pale cotton of her shirt.
‘You set the fire, you drew her here, you knew she loved this place, so by torching the warehouse you’d bring her back here, then you broke her heart and then you broke her.’ Green was gasping, his words coming in staccato bursts, kneeling over Walker now, smashing his head into the concrete, his rage making everything sluggish and blurred.
‘The fire cleans,’ said Walker, but his voice came from far away, as if it wasn’t his anymore. ‘Broke her heart,’ he said, it was a low snarling sound, the last of his anger, ‘she broke my heart,’ and then in among the snot and the blood pooling beneath Walker’s face there came surprising tears and a wrenching sob pulled deep from within his guts.
The Death & Life of Red Henley Page 20