Always

by Nicola Griffith

  AS I GOT OUT OF THE CAR AND STARTED UNLOADING THE TRUNK, THE SLANTING sun turned my windshield to gold. It wasn’t just the light, it was a faint dusting of pollen. Yesterday there had been one minute less than twelve hours of daylight, today one minute more; it was twenty degrees warmer than the past week; tomorrow there might be rain: spring gamboling as senselessly as a new lamb.

  I opened the basement door with difficulty at 6:01. That familiar scent of dust, competing perfumes, and carpet.

  “Sorry I’m late,” I said, and kicked the door shut behind me.

  “What the hell is all that?”

  "Swords,” I said, dropping one bag, “or maybe they’re lightsabers, it’s hard to tell.” I dropped another bag, the one full of T-shirts and the sponges and the red ink, and set down the cheap gas station cooler. I pulled one of the plastic toys, lime green, from the first bag and examined it. “No, it’s a sword. A cutlass, I believe.”

  “This has got to be a lightsaber,” said Pauletta, picking up another and holding it like a shocking pink banana.

  “Let me see. No. It’s meant to be a katana.”

  “A what now?”

  “Katana. Japanese sword.” A hollow plastic imitation of the one I had at home, with a braid-wrapped ray-skin hilt and signed tang and a blade that shone like watered silk.

  “I think I’m pretty safe in saying that is not a sword.” Nina pointed at the white polystyrene cooler.

  “Take a look inside.”

  She toed off the lid and peered in. “Water pistols.”

  “Unfilled,” I said. “Two volunteers to fix that.” Suze and Christie won the privilege and practically ran from the room. “And a volunteer to kick the cooler to bits.”

  Katherine and Tonya decided they could manage that between them, and did. The polystyrene squealed and squeaked. I half expected Nina to say, “Scream, sucker,” in an action-hero voice but she just watched. Perhaps she didn’t like mysteries, perhaps it had been difficult for her last week admitting, even to herself, that she’d been assaulted.

  “Everyone else, stretch out and warm up.” They were doing that, and the cooler was a pile of jagged polystyrene splinters by the time Suze and Christie got back with the loaded guns. Christie’s hair was wet and the back of Suze’s T-shirt was sticking to her spine. Clearly they’d felt obliged to test-fire a couple.

  They settled into stretching with the rest. “Today we’re going to talk about weapons: guns, knives, sticks, and swords. What they can do, what you do if faced with one.”

  Several laughed, some nervously. Weapons weren’t made of Day-Glo plastic; plastic couldn’t hurt them. Right?

  I picked up the shocking pink katana, twirled it like a baton, then balanced it on my index finger, thinking. “Who thinks they can stab my hand with this?”

  “Me. You bet,” said Kim. I tossed it to her. She caught it on the blade. A martial arts class would have stopped everything to explain about taking the weapon seriously, treating it with exaggerated respect, but that was not what I was after.

  From the bag I took two large white T-shirts, a sponge, and a bottle of red ink. I pulled one of the T-shirts over my head, then poured a little red ink into the sponge. “Give the sword back a minute.”

  I squeezed the wet sponge around the sword below the hilt and pulled the blade through my fist so that it gleamed redly. I gave it back to Pauletta, then wrapped the second T-shirt around my hand like a cartoon bandage and held out my hand.

  “Stab this. Leave a big bloody mark in the middle.” I stepped back a little. She edged forward. I edged back.

  “No fair. Keep still.”

  “If someone was standing opposite you with a sword, or a knife, or a gun, would you stand still?”

  “Then how can I stab you?”

  “Good question.”

  She charged, stabbing madly, and I moved away, and she missed. She looked mortified.

  “It’s very hard to hit a moving target—with a blade, or a bullet.”

  I gestured for her to give me the sword. The ink was dry; I leaned it against the wall, picked up a water pistol.

  “Who wants to have a go at shooting my hand with the gun?”

  “I’ll do that,” said Suze.

  “Choose your weapon.”

  She picked an orange-and-red ray gun and held it in two hands, like a TV cop.

  “What kind of gun is it?”

  “A big one,” she said with relish.

  “Anyone, give me the name of a handgun.”

  “SIG-Sauer P210,” Therese said. “Or a Smith and Wesson 627, if you prefer revolvers.”

  Everyone looked surprised, or perhaps impressed. I certainly was.

  “That’s a heavy gun,” I said.

  “Nearly three pounds, unloaded. But it takes eight rounds.”

  “How many’s the other one got?” Suze asked her.

  “The Sig? Eight in the magazine, one in the chamber.”

  “Then that’s what this is.”

  “All right,” I said, and stood about ten feet away. “Shoot me.” I sounded like something from a bad porn film.

  Suze took a wide-legged stance, aimed, and I waved the T-shirted hand very slowly to one side just as she began to squeeze.

  “Shit.” She squirted again. I made the wave a lazy, three-dimensional figure eight. She began to swear and pump furiously with her index finger and I simply walked up to her, still waving one hand, though a little more randomly, and took the gun away.

  “Of course,” I said to the class, “I doubt I’d be as calm if that were a real gun. Then again, with the noise and the weight and only nine bullets, she probably wouldn’t have been as accurate.”

  “She missed!” Pauletta said.

  “Yes. Most people do, most of the time.”

  “Handguns are more accurate than water pistols,” Therese said.

  “In the hands of an expert, and on the range, wearing ear protection and aiming at a stationary target, yes. In real life, no. A shooter will hit a running target only four times out of a hundred—and even then the bullet is extremely unlikely to find a vital organ. You can improve even those overwhelmingly favorable odds by not running in a straight line.”

  “But . . .” Nina said, and couldn’t think of anything to add.

  “If someone pulls a weapon on you, keep breathing and start thinking.”

  “Start running.”

  “Yes, if you can. If you can’t, start asking yourself questions. What weapon is it? What kind of person is holding the weapon?” They all looked monumentally blank. “Ask yourself what they want. If you know what they want, you can make some good guesses about what happens next, where your advantage might lie. So, what do they want?”

  “To hurt you.”

  “Sometimes.”

  No one else had anything to offer. I decided to approach from another direction.

  “Remember that they can’t hurt you with a stick or a knife unless they can touch you with it. They can’t hurt you with a gun unless they can hit you. That means stay out of reach, and start moving.”

  “What if he’s already behind you in the car?”

  “He won’t be, because you will have parked in a well-lit spot, and before you get in the car, you have looked through the window.”

  “I will?”

  “Yes. As you approach the car, you have your keys ready. You are not overburdened by bags. You examine the car by eye as you get closer, noting whether there are any extra shadows under or inside the vehicle.” Why didn’t they know this?

  “Underneath?”

  “Attackers have been known to hide there.”

  “Jeez, I never thought of that.”

  If they spent time worrying about being attacked in the first place, why didn’t they spend time considering realistic possibilities and responses?

  “So what do we do if there’s someone under the car?” Jennifer said.

  I looked around with raised eyebrows and waited. “Leave?” said Christie
.

  I nodded. “If he can’t touch you, he can’t hurt you.”

  “Unless he has a gun.”

  Either they were unable to listen or they couldn’t connect the dots. “The hit rate of four times in a hundred only applies under usual circumstances. If the assailant is squeezed under a car I imagine the number is even smaller. Also, as we’ve learnt before, you can use almost anything as a weapon. You could throw your groceries at him before you run. A can of tomatoes makes a formidable weapon.” Or a cup of hot coffee. Or a good yell. Or a spray of oven cleaner.

  Nina made a rock, paper, scissors hand. “My tomato beats your gun.” They all laughed.

  I wasn’t in the mood for it today. “I’ve given you statistics,” I said. “Now you tell me what it is about guns and knives, even toy ones, that makes you all so nervous.”

  No one offered an answer. Katherine shifted from foot to foot. Kim started flicking her nails.

  I sat down. “You may as well make yourselves comfortable. This may take a while.”

  They sat one by one.

  “This is a serious question. Why do knives and guns scare you so much?” Flick, flick, flick. Tonya’s faint wheeze.

  After a long thirty seconds, Therese said, “We’re afraid of getting hurt.” “Let me tell you something about the times you’ve been hurt, all of you, every single one: it didn’t kill you.”

  “But getting hurt . . . it hurts.” Pauletta.

  “Certainly. So does having routine blood tests. Or dental work. Having children, spraining your ankle, menstrual cramps. A hundred and one things you’ve all been through before and survived.”

  “But a knife. Being cut.”

  “None of you has been cut while chopping vegetables?”

  “Do you really not understand?” Therese said. “It’s the malice. It’s the fear. It’s the idea of some masked man with a knife threatening to torture you, and you being so scared that you do anything he says. Anything. You humiliate yourself just so he won’t . . . damage you.”

  “So he won’t cut your nipples off and rape you with the knife!” Jennifer said.

  There was a gelid silence and they all looked away.

  The bogeyman with a knife. Afraid of the bogeyman, because they didn’t know that 76 percent of women who are raped and/or physically assaulted are attacked by a current or former husband, cohabiting partner, or date; that for women ages fifteen to forty-four, domestic violence was the leading cause of injury. They have met the bogeyman and they are married to him, at least according to the Journal of the American Medical Association.

  I had encountered ignorance before in my brief stint as a community liaison officer. They didn’t understand, they didn’t know. They hadn’t been twelve when their mother had visited a London domestic violence center in her ambassador’s clothes, chatted politely to the executive director, and been given a green-covered, amateurishly designed book titled The Women Against Rape Study. Their mother hadn’t given that mysterious-looking book to her assistant. They hadn’t taken the book from the assistant’s desk the next day and leafed through it, trying to understand who their mother was and what it was that other people thought interested her.

  I had gradually become fascinated by that book, with its columns and tables of statistics, its quotes from women who had been attacked by husbands and brothers and boyfriends, by bosses and transport workers and babysitter’s fathers.

  I had read that green-bound book over and over, in between novels like The Lord of the Rings and Narnia and Dune, and had gradually come to believe it was my job to be the wise and powerful one, the wizard, the warrior, the seer; my job to lead my people and protect them from harm. I was the one with the noble brow and the secret book of runes, I was the one who knew. And so I became that person. I taught myself. I read that book, and others. I watched people. I studied their faces, their hands, their words. I learnt karate, and later wing chun, and boxing, and aikido, and tai chi. Killed a man who pointed a gun at me when I was eighteen. Joined the police force. And gradually forgot that I had ever had to learn, that I hadn’t been born this way, that nobody is.

  I stood and pulled my shirt off.

  “The fuck . . . ?” Suze said.

  I pointed to a silvery line about three inches long on my left side, just above my hip.

  “This thin scar here, that was a knife. At the time it felt as though someone had drawn a pen along my ribs. I barely noticed. Adrenaline does that.” I walked slowly around the circle of women. Look. See. Know. This is what it’s like to have your skin opened like the thin skin of a peach and watch the juice run out. “It bled a fair amount, but I didn’t even need to go to the emergency room, I just bound it up.”

  “It didn’t hurt at all?” Tonya looked as though she wanted to put her fingers on it, in it. Doubting Tonya.

  “It hurt the next day, a kind of deep ache, a bit like the worst time I sliced my finger when cutting up carrots.”

  I showed them that scar on the tip of my left index finger. There was a scar on my thumb, too, but I couldn’t remember what that was from.

  “Cutting carrots?” Katherine said, with a look that said, Are you fooling with me?

  “I took naproxen and that helped.”

  “Like for period pains.”

  “Yes. Pain is pain, whether it’s ‘natural’ or not.”

  They chewed on that.

  “Were you afraid?” Jennifer said.

  “No. It happened too fast. It often does.”

  “Was he trying to kill you?”

  “No.”

  “What did he want?”

  “He, they, wanted to escape. I was in their way. It wasn’t personal.”

  “Not personal!”

  “No, I don’t think so. He wasn’t expecting me there in the first place. He didn’t care whether I hurt or not, whether I died or not, he only cared about himself.”

  I couldn’t tell what they were thinking.

  “This”—I bent my left arm and put my fist on my shoulder to show the pink furrow running along the line between triceps and biceps, then turned so they could see the entry wound by my left shoulder blade—“this was a rifle bullet, fired from a scoped weapon. I couldn’t tell you if that was personal or not. It was for money. He was an expert, who was lying prone and ready in the snow. Snow. I was a dark target against a white background. As you see, it missed all my vital organs. I was hit here on the shoulder and the bullet traveled just under my skin, down my arm, and out near the elbow. I lost blood but was able to drive myself back to safety eventually. I’m told that the scar can be repaired nicely. This—”

  “Wait. How did that feel?”

  “At the time, it felt as though someone had punched me in the back.” And then I had been worrying about not getting shot again, about hypothermia, and bleeding too much, and, overwhelmingly, worrying for Julia.

  Therese said something.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “After that? After the punch in the back?”

  “It hurt. But pain is just a message. Just a note to let you know that something is wrong. You can ignore the message.”

  “You can’t ignore a hole in your back.”

  “You can. You can ignore anything if your life depends upon it. Pain is just a message. Of course, I did take some morphine.”

  “Morphine.”

  “Yes. And later I went to hospital.”

  “Did the police catch him, the guy?”

  “They found him.”

  “Did he go to jail?”

  “No. He didn’t make it that far.”

  Most of them didn’t get it, but Sandra was looking at me, face very still, eyes like a photograph of an eclipse: pupil a black hole, iris blazing, almost writhing, like a corona. I didn’t understand her message. “That one,” she said, pointing to my neck, “that looks personal.”

  “An addict. An adolescent with a straight razor. I couldn’t tell at first if it was a boy or a girl. It turned out to be a boy.” I
had seen his naked, skinny little chest when I had taken his sweater. I could have killed him. I nearly did. “As I say, an addict, or schizophrenic.” Funny, that had never occurred to me before.

  “Were you scared?”

  “I thought I was going to die, but I’m not sure I was scared.”

  “What did you do?”

  “He had the blade against my jugular. He’d probably seen how from television. For a little while, I gave up. I just started telling a story.” I had spent months trying not to think about that night, how I had known, really known, I would die, how sordid I found the situation, the understanding that this was it, right there, in the dark, in a park full of homeless people in a city where I knew nobody while wearing the clothes of a man I had just beaten half to death, and that there was nothing, nothing to be done.

  “A story. Like a Dick and Jane type story?”

  “No. I don’t remember, exactly. I just talked and talked, and then he wavered, because he was young and he needed his drugs, and his arm dropped, and I took the razor away from him.”

  “Did you hurt him?” Suze said.

  “No.” But there had been a moment when I considered cutting his throat, watching his blood gush out and down his chest. It would have been black in the faint city light among the trees. “No. I left.”

  “Don’t tell me, no hospital, right?”

  “Right. A plane, to North Carolina. Then healing. There was some . . . some blood loss.”

  “No shit.”

  “But not everyone’s like you,” Kim said. “We can’t let someone shoot us, stab us, slit our throats, and then go home and take an aspirin.”

  “The human body is very strong, very difficult to kill, unless you’re facing an expert.” If I put a razor to someone’s throat, they’d die. “And they, I, you heal. Look.” I sat down and pulled up my left pants leg, past the two-inch white scar just below the back of my knee. “This happened when I was nine. Or eight, something like that. A nail sticking out of a piece of wood. I was running around in the garden, jumped over something, felt a little scratch, then—”

  “Blood for days,” Nina said, nodding. “Cuts on the plump parts, near a joint, they just gush. ’Specially if you’ve been running. See this?” She flexed her right arm, showed a very similar scar just above her elbow. “Barbed-wire fence. And this”—she showed us four neat indentations across the tops of the fingers on her left hand—“a steel tape measure. We were running around on this construction site when I was a kid, three of us holding the tape, only I tripped over my own ankles and fell over and, zzzt, they ran on and the tape cut me open.”