by Claire Gray
Steve and I look at each other. I think I’m about to be sick and begin bunching up my top so that I can catch the vomit in it and not stain the rented car. But, instead, I pant and wheeze and nothing comes out of me, while that lady continues to chuckle right behind us.
‘Look, kids,’ she says suddenly. ‘Hand yourselves in and I’ll help you. I have a lot of money. I mean a lot. I’ll make it worth your while. Go to prison for me. It’s even better this way, without a baby involved. You tell them you killed him. You killed them all.’
‘We’ll certainly think about it,’ Steve says loudly. ‘But let’s go get those coffees first.’
Pamela doesn’t reply, but when I peek back at her I see that she’s smiling, showing all of her pointy little teeth. She stays that way until the expression is no longer a smile. It’s not an expression I can read at all. Her eyes are the colour of metal, looking at nothing.
‘Go faster,’ I whisper.
Chapter Forty-Three
Only one more block to travel before we reach the police station. Dolph and Maliwan haven’t replied to the text message I sent, and I suppose I’m relieved in a way. Once we’ve handed Pamela Shuttleworth over to the police it will be the end for her, and we can continue on without her. If we stop to talk outside the police station it just increases the chances of something going wrong.
The roads are busy in town today. Steve has to brake when a little car pulls away from the kerb, and then a group of women on mopeds swarm around us. We crawl along behind them and then get stuck at a set of temporary traffic lights. Some of the mopeds edge around the lights and keep going, but we’re stuck as the oncoming traffic flows in a noisy, polluted wave either side of us.
‘Come on, come on,’ Steve says, whistling under his breath and tapping at the steering wheel with his chewed-up nails.
Some military vehicles and refuse trucks rumble across the crossroad, dust and little scraps of debris tumbling from the backs of them.
‘I suppose that’s why the traffic’s so bad all of a sudden,’ I say. ‘Maybe they’re clearing out the bomb site.’
Steve’s about to speak, but he freezes as a door opens in the back of our car and Pamela Shuttleworth flings herself out, landing on her feet like a mangy cat. She runs through the traffic, seemingly unaware of the mopeds, cars and people shouting from bicycles. A scarf trails from her neck and falls to the ground, where it’s ripped up by tyres.
The light turns green and our lane of traffic begins to move, but Steve remains frozen, his mouth half open and his eyes following her erratic route along the street.
‘Go after her!’ I cry.
He accelerates hard, overtakes some mopeds, and we turn right at the crossroads. There are lumps of concrete in the road, fallen from the passing trucks, and we bounce over them so that I hit my shoulder against the door.
‘She’s there, she’s there!’ I say, hopping about in my seat. She’s just passing a group of backpackers who are eating street food as they walk, and then she disappears behind a row of street vendors who are selling noodles, meat on sticks, umbrellas, porcelain dragons, all twinkling and glistening beneath the sun.
Steve bumps the car onto the kerb and brakes so hard that the wheels skid and we hit a dustbin. I’m still sitting there, listening to the noise of metal on metal, when one of the backpackers appears at my window and mouths a question at me. Her eyes are wide and she straightens her glasses as she stares at me.
‘We’re fine, we’re fine. Sorry,’ I say, opening my door and tumbling out of it, the air so furiously hot that I can feel it sitting heavy in my lungs as I struggle to take a breath.
‘You crashed?’ the girl says in a French accent.
Steve appears beside me, sweat pouring down his face. ‘Everything’s okay, don’t worry,’ he says to the girl. He puts a hot hand against my shoulder and pushes me along the pavement, away from the car and past the stalls. The people working there watch us pass. A couple of them are laughing at us, but the others have hard, closed looks upon their faces. I want to tell them that we’re not bringing more trouble to their town; we’re trying to stop it.
‘I don’t see her anywhere,’ I gasp.
‘We can’t lose her now.’
I look along the road to where the police station is sitting, hazy through the heat. We were so close, but there is a sea of people between us and it; the road is busy with people piled on top of mopeds and push bikes, trucks bump past leaving dust in the air which I can smell over the frying of the food. People are wandering past the stalls and talking together beside metal tables which glitter in the sunshine. Brightly-coloured baskets are filled with produce, and one lonely bird with a hat on its head sits tethered to a perch. Westerners, still faintly dazed from the events of the week, move through the throng, some stopping to buy things or to gently finger the bags and clothes hanging from rails, to point at the ornaments, to eat the food. Empty crates are stacked about into crooked towers, and litter has piled up along the edge of the road. Steve and I stare thorough this ocean of movement and noise and shifting, anxious faces. Pamela Shuttleworth is nowhere to be seen.
We walk along the street until we’re level with the police station. Then we cross over, dodging the mopeds, and walk back until we’re standing opposite our abandoned hire car. An elderly Thai man is standing beside the vehicle, shaking his head at the way we’ve left it.
‘We lost her,’ Steve says. ‘She’s gone.’
‘She wanted to die,’ I say.
‘You think that’s what she’s gone to do?’
I shrug. My body feels heavy and I want to sit down, but I stay standing. I check Steve’s phone, which is in my pocket. Dolph and Maliwan haven’t replied to the message I sent from the car. I don’t want them to know how badly we’ve messed up.
‘Let’s look a while longer,’ Steve says. ‘She’s old and drunk. How far could she possibly have gone?’
So, we walk up and down, peering into any open shops and cafés, checking the alleys that run between buildings and asking the taxi drivers if they’ve seen her. Steve tries to describe her in Thai, gesturing wildly and scrunching up his face, then nodding hopefully as people shake their heads. She’s gone.
By the time we return to the car, some of the stalls are being packed up and the number of people passing by has thinned. Men are loading crates onto the back of a van, shouting at each other as they do so, and scaring the pigeons away.
‘Look,’ Steve says, touching my arm.
Where the crates have been shifted away from the wall, an opening to an alleyway has appeared. There are torn posters pasted to the bricks and slimy vegetables on the ground, where someone must have tipped them out after closing up their food stand. Dark shadows are cast by the walls and the passage is only narrow, but we head over there and squeeze around the remaining crates, the men ignoring us and continuing their yelled conversation.
‘This would be a fine hiding place,’ Steve says.
I agree, and follow him into the shadows.
Chapter Forty-Four
Pamela is folded on the ground like a dead bird.
She is at the very end of the passageway, which turns at a right angle and runs behind the buildings before stopping at a dead end. There a several padlocked doors along the way, and a coil of barbed wire along the top of the back wall, partially fallen from position so that it hangs towards us like a snake.
Steve drops to his knees beside her and reaches out with his hands. But he can’t quite bring himself to make contact; his palms hover just above the curve of her back, which reminds me of the way a roast chicken looks once it’s had all the meat hacked away.
‘Oh shit,’ I say. ‘What do we do? Shall I go for help?’
Her cheek is flat against the concrete. I can’t seem to pull my eyes away from her twisted face, the sticky pink mucus that has run from her mouth to the ground, and the way her fingers look, all grey and twisted up beneath her. But her eyes, half open, still have a knowing glint in
them. I can tell that she’s dead. Her body is no different to the rotten vegetables that are strewn on the ground here, slimy grey leaves turning to nothing.
Steve, still on his knees, looks up at me. I’ve been hanging back by the wall, but as his eyes meet mine I shuffle forwards, my feet knocking against a pile of damp cardboard boxes and scaring a family of cockroaches out from beneath it.
‘We should check for a pulse,’ he mutters, reaching slowly towards her neck.
‘Be careful,’ I whisper, like she still might rise up and grab him, dig her claws into his arm.
He touches her for just a second and then pulls his hand away like it’s been burned.
‘Jesus Christ,’ he says, biting his lip. ‘She’s definitely dead. I can feel it.’
I force myself to go closer and help him to his feet.
‘What the hell do we do now?’ he says, covering his face with his hands. I can see his whole body shaking.
‘I think we should leave. Let’s just go. Okay?’
‘Okay.’ He nods, his face still hidden behind his hands.
And so we leave.
Chapter Forty-Five
I spot what I think is a bloody handprint on the frame of Steve’s front door, but he says that it’s charcoal from a barbeque he made a mess of last summer.
‘I should clean it off but it’s fairly ingrained into the wood now,’ he says. He doesn’t sound sure though, and we both look at it for a while, reluctant to go inside.
When we do step through the door, Dolph and Maliwan are not here. If it wasn’t for the menthol cigarettes stubbed out in the giant shell by the back door, or the cotton wool pads in the bathroom bin, smeared with pink nail varnish, it would be easy to believe that they were never here at all.
My phone is on the coffee table. I pick it up and read the message that I sent to it earlier, trying to imagine how Dolph and Maliwan would have felt when they read it and what they might have done next.
‘Do you think they’re coming back?’ Steve asks as he opens the fridge and peers inside. He just stands there, not taking anything out. The light from inside of it stains his body a washed-out shade of yellow.
‘I don’t think we’ll ever see them again.’
I come through to the kitchen and notice the bubbles in the sink, mounds of them, and the way that the tiles around the sink have been scrubbed clean, whiter than they have ever been.
‘Steve?’ I say. ‘How do you think she died?’
‘She did want to kill herself. You said that.’ He’s still staring into the fridge.
‘Yes. But do you think that’s what happened?’
‘I don’t know.’ Finally, he pulls a bottle of champagne out from the door of the fridge, closing it with his elbow. Then he rummages through the cupboards, only discovering one champagne flute. He grabs a cylindrical vase from the window ledge, tipping spare change and a couple of crusty paint brushes from it, and uses this as a second glass.
‘Don’t you want to save that for when you have something to celebrate?’ I suggest, looking at the bottle of expensive champagne. I sit on the couch and try to imagine Dolph and Maliwan sleeping here. I can’t quite picture them. They’re already slipping away. No one except Steve and I know that they were ever in our lives, now that Pamela Shuttleworth is dead. We can pretend none of it happened, if we want.
‘It’s been sitting in here for months,’ Steve says. ‘She was a terrible person. Did you notice how she moved like a praying mantis? But I would still prefer not to have seen her like that. Don’t you feel the same?’
‘It was horrible.’ I nod, but that word isn’t big enough to explain how revolted I am, or the way that the memory of what we found in that alley is turning into something dark and stirring, which will always be waiting for me when I try to sleep, try to think, try to move on and be a good person.
‘I wonder how long it will be until someone finds her,’ Steve says. He carefully twists the cork in the champagne bottle until it opens with a sigh into his fist. He pours us each a generous helping. I don’t much want any alcohol, I already feel sick, but I accept the glass and take a sip, feeling the bubbles pop against my nose.
‘We should have told someone,’ I say, surprising myself as I down the champagne with ease. It tastes like fresh air. I don’t object as Steve fills my glass back up. ‘We still could.’
‘Yes,’ Steve says, but neither of us make any effort to pick up a phone.
‘Whose baby do you think it was?’ I ask. The idea that the baby might not be Dolph’s has left me feeling strange in my stomach; there’s a gnawing in the hollow where I once held a man’s baby.
‘I have a horrible feeling that it was his. Bernard Shuttleworth’s.’
‘Me too.’
Steve pours us some more champagne and then the bottle is empty. He goes into the kitchen to see what else he can find. There’s a nearly-full bottle of red wine beside the bin. He pulls out the stopper and gives it a sniff. ‘I used this to cook with the night the bomb went off. I was going to throw it out but I think it’s still good. Have some?’
‘Sure,’ I say, because the champagne has lit a gentle warmth inside me, which is slowly melting away the cold horror of everything that has come before it.
We continue to drink as the light outside the window turns orange and then is extinguished. We finish everything alcoholic in the house; miniature bottles of whiskey, a can of beer with fluff stuck to it which had rolled beneath Steve’s bed, a lemony liquor in a bottle shaped like a parrot. Eventually we remember that Steve had purchased beers for the four of us to enjoy tonight, and he finds them in the fridge.
‘It’s funny how plans change,’ he says.
There are several times during the evening when we think that we hear people outside the door. Twice we open it to find no one there. Once there is a cat eating a frog, and the final time we open it just as some teenagers are passing by, glaring at us and then laughing.
‘They’re definitely not coming back,’ Steve says. ‘Perhaps they’ve left the island by now.’
‘I expect you’re right,’ I say, and I’m not sure how I feel about it. ‘We should have all said goodbye to each other. We’d sort of become partners.’
‘Partners in what exactly? I’m not good with goodbyes at the best of times. I wouldn’t even know where to begin with that one. This is probably for the best. We weren’t really partners. We were thrown together and then we were thrown apart again. Make sense?’
‘I think so,’ I say.
‘We’re partners though, you and I.’
Steve puts a romantic comedy on the television but I find it hard to follow; people are hiding in closets and running after buses. Neither of us laugh. I’m no longer enjoying my drink very much; the bubbles are rising at the back of my throat, and the lights are starting to spin as my eyes roll from side to side. I slump into the cushions and slide towards Steve, who is still drinking at speed and is checking the news on his phone.
‘We need to find Kadesadayurat tomorrow and convince him to tell us something about the bomber,’ Steve says. ‘I need to know. It’s driving me mad.’
‘Me too. Without a name or anything, I can’t quite believe that it’s real.’
‘And then I think perhaps we should leave for a while.’
‘Leave where?’ I ask, my brain slow.
‘The island. There’s been so much damage done over this last week and we’ve been part of it somehow. We should go away. I want to go someplace I’ve never been to before. Somewhere that hasn’t been ruined yet.’
‘I thought you wanted to visit your daughter.’
‘I do. I’ll go there. I’ve never been there before. It’s called Cork.’
‘Will you come back?’ I ask, feeling a pressure at the back of my throat, and tears heavy in my eyes. I want to ask him not to leave me, and perhaps I will, because the alcohol is beginning to loosen words that I wouldn’t usually speak.
‘Of course. This is my home. But, Lucy,
I honestly think you should go somewhere too.’ He pauses for a moment, and then adds: ‘You’re better than this newspaper, you know? You’re not washed-up like me.’
I laugh, throw some more lager down my throat and try to think of something to say.
‘I mean it though,’ Steve says. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Are you really going to ask me about that right now? I just like it here, okay?’ I attempt to take another swig of my drink but knock the bottle hard against my teeth. I laugh at myself and slide further into the cushions, where I can feel dust and stale crisps collected in the folds.
‘Oh, you’re drunk,’ Steve says, his face suddenly right beside mine, and in that moment, I think I know how to fix things. I know how to show him how important he is to me, how close we’ve become not just as colleagues but as people. I know how to birth a little good thing into the night when everything that has come before it has been ugly and bad. And, most of all, I know how to fix the emptiness that has been screaming inside me ever since that day when I became pregnant and forgot how to be near men.
I turn my face to kiss Steve, feeling his moustache against my lips and the beer in his mouth mix with the beer in mine. I realise instantly that I’ve made a horrible mistake because the shape of his mouth feels wrong, he is pulling away from me, holding up his hands and shaking his head.
‘What are you doing, you drunken idiot?’ he says to me. He laughs and then looks almost frightened.
‘I have no idea. I’m so sorry.’
‘I could be your dad,’ he says. ‘And besides that, you realise I’m gay, right? I thought you knew that.’
‘No,’ I say, unable to keep myself from sobbing, which makes me feel even more stupid. I’ve held onto my tears for days and now I’m crying over this. ‘I guess I never thought about it.’
‘I figured you knew because I know and we always seem to get each other. We clicked the moment we met. You remember, at the dock? I knew we were going to be best friends. Best friends. Not this. You know that. You’re just drunk. Don’t worry about it.’ Steve puts an arm around my shoulder and pulls me close to him.