Talking to the Dead: A Novel

by Harry Bingham

  “No one ever is when it happens. You have to find a way to be there like this.” Lev snaps his fingers. Then, because Shostakovich is doing something that makes Lev happy, he raises a finger for a moment’s silent appreciation and we listen to violins and oboes for a while.

  We go back to the kitchen. I need to finish the joint, and Lev needs more jam in tea.

  “The other situation you were in. Not recently. Last year or whenever. When you hurt the guy.”

  “We’ve been through that.”

  “So we go through it again. You’ve only been in two situations, right? We need to understand how you react.”

  “Okay, in one situation, I beat the guy up. In the other situation, I let him knock me over and then I was so terrified I didn’t know what to do next.”

  “Fine. So we go back to the first situation. We play it out again.”

  I draw down hard on the joint, until I get to the little bit of cardboard I use as the filter, and the very last of the weed has disappeared into my lungs. I don’t know why I get Lev involved in things sometimes. He never lets go of them. Then again, that’s exactly why I get him involved. I drop the stub of the joint into the remains of my tea and shift my chair, so it’s in the right relation to the table.

  “I’m here. T.D.C. Griffiths, wet behind the ears, writing in her notebook. You’re standing up, wandering around. I’m not feeling anything weird going on. Then you step behind me. Not that side. This side. You reach down and fondle my breast.”

  Lev reaches down and puts his hand on my breast. There’s nothing tentative about his touch. There’s no apology and nothing seedy. For Lev, it’s just about realism.

  “Ready?” I say.

  Needlessly. Lev is always ready. He still has his hand on my breast.

  “Ready,” he says.

  Then I move. As near as possible to the way it happened. Chair back. Slam my hand upward to catch his jaw. I feel Lev jerk back in an imitation of pain and surprise. That pulls his fondling hand away from my breast, giving me room to grab his fingers and yank back against his line of motion. That’s what broke the guy’s fingers when it happened for real. I’m standing now, and able to kick out at the kneecap. Lev is big on kneecaps, where I’m involved at least. If I’m in a fight with anyone, then I’m going to lose if it lasts more than a few seconds. Likewise, if anyone can get ahold of me, they’ll be far too powerful for me. Kneecaps and, to a lesser extent, testicles represent my principal means of immobilizing my counterpart. For that reason, most of the instruction that I’ve done with Lev has focused on those fine body parts.

  This time, once I’ve caught his kneecap in a nice, clean blow, he stops.

  “I fall now, right?”

  “Yes. Kind of sideways and down. That way. Yes.”

  “But there was more, no?”

  “The guy was rolling as he fell. I shoved him against the table. An instinct thing. But I pushed quite hard, and the corner penetrated his cheek. There was a lot of blood.”

  “And then?”

  “The fight was over. He had three broken fingers and a dislocated kneecap. Plus he was whimpering like a six-year-old and there was blood bubbling out through a hole in his cheek.”

  “Okay, but then he’s on the floor here. How had he fallen? This way? Like this?”

  “Yes, like that. No, legs apart a bit more. Yes. Exactly like that.”

  “And then?”

  “Lev, this was the very first time it had happened, okay? I wasn’t in an ordinary state of mind.”

  “Of course you weren’t. This was fight.”

  That’s a big theme of Lev’s. The reason why he teaches Krav Maga. The reason why the Israeli Special Forces developed the technique in the first place. Fights—real fights—don’t happen on tatami mats. They don’t start with people bowing to each other and sprinkling water from brass bowls. They start in pubs, in alleyways, in places you don’t want to fight. They make use of whatever weapons come to hand. They don’t have rules. They don’t let you submit gracefully and make a respectful bow to the person who felled you.

  Krav Maga is strictly real-world. Functional. In Krav Maga, you don’t get instructors saying things like “And if your assailant comes at you with a sword …” It’s all about making use of what you’ve got. Low-risk, efficient maneuvers. Proceeding as rapidly as possible from defense to attack. Maximum violence, maximum disablement. Fast, nasty, decisive.

  At Hendon, when I was undergoing police training, we learned a set of techniques that were more jujitsu-based. Useful enough and quite pretty. But I was way ahead of them. I’d been working on Krav Maga with Lev since Cambridge, and my own aim in training at Hendon was to avoid revealing how much I really knew. I passed that course with the lowest grade possible. Petite, bookish, geeky Fiona. No one expected anything else.

  “Okay,” I say, because I know Lev won’t let go of this until I tell him. “I just stood over the guy and kicked between his legs until I could hardly feel my toes.”

  “He was disabled?”

  “One burst testicle. Everything else was patched up okay.”

  “And your employers. You got into trouble for this?”

  “Yes. Some. More than I wanted. But everyone believed me when I said that he’d started it. I told them that I was frightened. I said he went on trying to grab me and I used reasonable force in self-defense.”

  Lev, whose sense of humor is mostly buried as deep as an Iranian centrifuge, finds this funny and repeats it twice. “Reasonable force. Reasonable force.” But that exhausts his supply of mirth, and he turns to other things. He checks for tea, finds that everything has gone cold, that I’ve finished the joint, and that Shostakovich has gone silent. He finds more music to put on and reboils the kettle.

  “Not frightened, I think. Trauma.”

  He says “trauma” with one of his nonstandard pronunciations. Trow-ma. Trow-ma.

  “Good heavens. Why would that be? Someone slaps me across the hallway in my own house and I’m frightened. How strange.”

  “Not then. When the guy grabs your breast.”

  “That wasn’t traumatic. I just overreacted.”

  “Exactly. And why did you?”

  “Why did I? Lev, I’m not you. You’ve spent half your life training for these situations. I haven’t.”

  He shakes his head. “No. I know what inexperience looks like. I train people. I know. This is not like inexperience. This is trauma. Sometimes it makes you too frightened to move. Other times it makes you go crazy. When we were there in the hallway, practicing just now, and you decided not to be frightened, you were crazy inside. We were only practicing, but you were crazy inside. I could feel it.”

  “You scared me. You did it deliberately. Penry didn’t say the things you said.”

  “So? It was only words, and these were pretend words as well. You have the trauma inside you. That’s why I find it so easily.”

  I’m angry with all this. I don’t exactly know why I asked Lev to come. Or rather, I knew ever since getting the gun that I should get some instruction from Lev on how to use it. He’d have a contempt for shooting ranges. That’s not where pistols are fired for real. He’d want me to practice with a gun the way we practiced the Krav Maga. Tired. In bad light. With movement. Swinging lights. Running. Moving targets. Too much else going on. Noise. The whole business about soft hands, lowered shoulders, left foot forward is so much hooey. Something to worry about on a shooting range and nowhere else on earth.

  But, typical bloody Lev, he never operates to my agenda, only to his own. And right now his agenda is inventing some rubbish theory about my past.

  “Lev, when I was a teenager, I had a breakdown. A really big, really bad, really serious breakdown. Stuff you wouldn’t understand. If you want to call that a trauma, then fine. It was a trauma. But if you’re trying to imply that there was anything else, then you’re wrong. Just plain wrong. I’ve never been raped. Until that idiot, no one ever touched me inappropriately. I’ve got a s
ane, stable, loving family. I’d never even been in a fight, until I started getting lessons from you.”

  “You have breakdown. When?”

  “When I was sixteen. It lasted till I was eighteen.”

  “And at Cambridge, when I met you, you were how old?”

  “Nineteen. I was still in recovery. I still am. I guess I always will be.”

  I met Lev at Cambridge. He was newly arrived in England, and made some money teaching combat techniques to students. I signed up with him. I didn’t know why then. I don’t know why now. I haven’t tried to analyze it. I just feel safer knowing I can take care of myself if I have to.

  “And you don’t tell me about this breakdown, until now?”

  “I don’t tell anyone, Lev. I never tell people.”

  “Okay, so let me get this picture. You’re happy little Fiona Griffith, wandering along through life, then in walks this great big breakdown for no reason at all. And when breakdown is gone, and you are in bad situation, you are either crazy woman or too frightened to move. So why would I think trauma?”

  Silence. Or at least, silence between us. Violins from next door.

  Lev realizes that the kettle has boiled and makes more tea for himself. He raises his eyebrows to ask me if I want any. I say no, then change my mind and say yes. But I don’t want tea. I don’t want a joint. I want alcohol, which obliterates my mind much better than any joint ever does, and which I don’t touch only because I’ve had some very bad experiences with it. Times when I’ve almost felt my illness back again, creeping into my bones and grinning at me like a gap-toothed skeleton. That’s why I’m a dope-smoking teetotaler, or near as dammit.

  “Maybe the breakdown was the trauma,” I add. “For two years, I didn’t know if I was alive or dead. You can’t know what that’s like. You couldn’t.”

  Wrong thing to say.

  Wrong thing to say to Lev.

  He sucks some more jam off his spoon and takes a swallow of tea. Then he crouches down opposite my chair. Makes me look into his eyes. Brown and fathomless. As deep as history. As empty as bones.

  “For two years almost, I was in Grozny. Grozny, Chechnya. The Russians were there. Also rebels. Bandits. Jihadists. Mercenaries. Spies. Every fucker on earth was there. Fuckers with guns. I was there because—Doesn’t matter. I stay because there is a lady and a little boy I care for very much. For two years almost. Because of who I was, everyone want me, nobody trust me, there is—shit, Fiona. There is shit. Every day. Friends are killed. Sometimes friends are killers. Every kind of bad thing that can happen is happening, and this is normal. This is how it is. Am I alive or am I dead? I don’t know. For two years, I don’t know. Not me only, but everyone in Grozny. Everyone in Chechnya. I know what it’s like, Fiona. I know.”

  I wave my hands in a gesture of pardon seeking. “Sorry, Lev. Sorry. So maybe you do know. Maybe your thing was worse, even. But mine was different. I wasn’t in Grozny. I was in Cardiff. And the shit wasn’t happening outside, it was happening inside. It just came and took me over.”

  Lev nods. “Trauma.”

  “From nowhere. Trauma from outer space,” I argue back.

  “You sleep okay?”

  “Yes. Like a baby. Better since I got the gun.”

  “And before?”

  “Before that—sometimes okay, sometimes not okay.”

  “Dreams?”

  “I never dream.” And that’s true. I never dream except sometimes when I wake up in blank terror and have no idea what I am terrified of. Nights with gaping horror in the middle of them and no reason why. A skull grinning in the dark. Nights when I have all too little difficulty in identifying my emotions.

  “Fear? You get frightened sometimes for no reason?”

  I’m about to tell him about those nights of terror, but then I stop. I remember that prickling feeling which I could never quite place. It’s been worse recently, but I’ve had it, or something like it, as long as I can remember. Maybe fear is the right name for it. Maybe that feeling is fear.

  I tell Lev “Maybe,” and instantly know that my “maybe” is wrong. That feeling is fear. And I’ve had it all my life. So I correct myself: “Yes. Not maybe. Yes.”

  Lev nods. “Trauma. You have trauma. What do the Americans call it? All their soldiers come home with it.”

  “PTSD. Post-traumatic stress disorder.”

  “Da. That. PTSD. You have that.”

  We leave it there.

  I can’t argue anymore. I’ve never been attacked. I’ve never been raped. My family home is as safe and protected as you could ever ask for. I wasn’t even bullied at school, for heaven’s sake. I don’t have dodgy uncles. I’ve never been felt up at a bus stop or groped in the cinema. Little Miss Sheltered. That’s me.

  Except that Lev’s right. I know it. I have trauma in my bones and I’ll never be at peace until I deal with it.

  I stand up. I’m far too tired. Lev is sitting, and I rub the back of his neck and massage the strong muscles running down to his shoulder blades. For a minute, just that, nothing else. Me massaging. Him leaning into it. Violins.

  I wonder how old he is. I wonder what else he’s seen. We know nothing about each other, not really.

  “Thanks, Lev. Are you staying? I’m off to bed. The keys are there if you want them.”

  I show him the keys to the garden shed. There’s a 50 percent chance that Lev will stay all night, smoking dope and listening to Shostakovich. There’s a 50 percent chance that he’ll be gone in the morning. I used to pay him for Krav Maga tuition back in the early days, but I stopped a long time ago. I don’t know why. He just stopped asking for money. These days, I don’t know what our relationship is. It’s not like friendship. Not in any normal way. But then we’re both freaks. Me because of my head, him because of his history. Maybe what we have is friendship. The freaks’ version.

  “Good night, Fiona.” The gun is still on the kitchen table, and he pushes it toward me. He knows that I’ll be sleeping with it. “If you get into a situation, remember you have trauma. Your instinct will tell you to do too much or too little. Both are bad. Use your head, not this.”

  He points to his heart.

  I nod. I know what he means. I’ve got a slogan for it.

  “Fuck feelings, trust reason,” I say.

  He grins and repeats.

  “Fuck feelings, trust reason.”

  I’m too tired. Much too tired.

  I slept decently, because of Lev, but even so I was late to bed and my alarm blitzes me awake at seven fifteen. Five hours’ sleep, not even, and that’s been my best night for a while.

  I blink myself into wakefulness. I’m still on the futon, not the bed. My hand found the gun before it found the alarm clock.

  I take a shower. Lev is sleeping on the upstairs landing. I don’t know why he chose there, but there’d have been some reason. He wakes up as I go past, or at least opens his eyes. With Lev, you can never really tell what’s awake and what’s asleep. I go back to my bedroom for a pillow and give him that, though there was an entire bed in the spare room if he’d wanted it, then I go ahead and shower. Even after the shower, my face looks tired. I choose soft, comfortable clothes and go downstairs. Lev has left bags of grass all over the kitchen table. I roll him a joint for when he gets up, then lock the rest of it away. I eat something.

  I go into work. Not because I want to, or because I care about any of it. Just because it’s what I know to do.

  I know I’ve been a bit odd recently—odder than usual, I mean—but I can feel that something has intensified overnight. It’s because of Lev. Him and his theories about trauma.

  Trow-ma. Mine or his? Maybe he’s no longer able to tell the difference. I wonder what he was doing in Chechnya. A bad place to be. Trow-ma.

  As I drive into Cathays Park, I bang my palms on the steering wheel, press down into my toes. I can feel my body, but only dimly. Through anesthesia. Layers of padding. Bev Rowland says a cheery hi to me as we meet on the way in, a
nd it takes me half a second to remember who she is.

  Eight thirty. Jackson gives the morning briefing. He’s in a crumpled shirt, no tie, no jacket. He’s been up all night, and he’s looking tired but happy.

  “We’ll keep this short,” he says. “Most of you know the important stuff anyway.

  “Last night, two officers, D.S. Alexander and D.C. Griffiths, obtained evidence that three men—current identifications Wojciech Kapuscinski, Yuri Petrov, and a third man known to us for the moment only as Dmitri—have committed serious assaults on local sex workers. One local woman, Jayne Armitage, exhibited signs of an extremely serious beating, which would constitute a grave offense in its own right, but as you all know, we believe these men are connected to Karol Sikorsky and quite likely also to the Operation Lohan murders, which still represent our prime focus.

  “Overnight, we’ve succeeded in arresting Kapuscinski and Petrov. They are being interrogated now. They shared a flat down in Butetown, less than half a mile from Allison Street and, needless to say, we’ve got our forensics guys crawling all over the flat right now. The flat is a proper mess, which is a good thing, because it increases the likelihood that we find something of value. No definite news yet, but we’re right on top of it.

  “I also want to say publicly that this inquiry owes a lot to Alexander and Griffiths. It’s not easy getting these street workers to talk. They achieved it. Many officers would have failed. Well done.”

  He’s going to continue, except that he’s interrupted by a round of clapping. Jane isn’t even here. She had a late night last night and she’s got a family to manage. I don’t know what to do or feel, so I just sit there looking like an idiot. A task I perform with considerable ease.

  Jackson continues.

  When Petrov was arrested, he had a little black address book with a Cardiff address against the letters KS in Cyrillic. The initials are assumed to refer to Karol Sikorsky, and the house in question is currently under surveillance. If there’s no movement at the house within twenty-four hours, a warrant will be applied for and the house searched.

  Meantime, D.C. Jon Breakell gets his moment of glory as well. CCTV from a month back on Corporation Road places Sikorsky and Janet Mancini together. He gets a round of clapping too.