by philip boyle
His life was a hotel room. Stay a few nights and move on to the next. Never settle, never belong anywhere. He knew the money would run out, but that thought was carefully hidden way at the moment. At one and the same time he saw himself having no purpose in life and having no other purpose than that of finding the only true thing he’d ever had in his life. Everything was former, behind him. In these dull grey thoughts he was finally thankfully drifting to sleep.
A soft thud. He woke with a start. Saw the red light of the TV. Waited for the reason to come. There it was again. He reached for the bedside lamp, turned his eyes quickly away from the harsh light. The clock said on the TV read two-fifty. There it was again, gaining a rhythm, a regular pattern. He padded to the door and stood at the spy hole. Whoever, whatever it was had passed. His head pounded, he saw darting spots in front of his eyes, suddenly felt light headed. He lay back in bed and nothing came except the rapid increase in the beating of his heart. Slow panic setting in, an irrational anxiety panic. He sat up, then stood up, in darkness, searching for a reason for his concern. He stood beside the phone, his fingers inches from lifting it. He would have to call someone, reception, they would have to call an ambulance. Because there was something terribly wrong, or it was about to happen even though he had no idea what it was. He felt the goosebumps on his body, everything on edge, expectant. He sat in the chair, he opened the window, let freezing air come in but nothing, nothing worked. He stood again, walked around the room. He started to dress, he would need to be ready when they came for him. Something seen out of the corner of his eye. A moth, hovering, frantic, by the lampshade, it settled on the wall behind the bed and Eddie watched, transfixed. A second moth appeared and rested on the headboard. He looked around for a magazine and found a brochure on the table. He screwed it up and approached the bed slowly. One down and the other moth was proving more elusive. He eventually got it and had to clean the remains from the wall. He then threw the brochure in the bin. And then it was gone. In the simple action of killing the insects, Eddie’s mind and body settled down, relaxed. The distraction of something other than his own morbid thoughts had proved the cure to the sudden mysterious illness. He almost cried with relief. He made himself a cup of jasmine tea and watched an old movie for a few beautifully banal moments. Then he slept until the maid knocked on his door the following morning.
He thought he was dreaming. The knock came again, light in his eyes, the end of the curtains blowing from the open window. He heard the key in the door, leapt from the bed and struggled into his jeans as the door started to open.
Eddie knew instinctively, almost immediately, that the look she gave him was borne of something more than shock at his state of undress. Her embarrassment was deeper, causing her to look away too quickly. She toyed with her bundle of keys, she mumbled something that he thought might have been Spanish. Excusing herself, scuttling out of the room, trying not to catch his eyes again. Maybe she was still new at the job. For a moment she stood still in the corridor, looked down toward the exit door at the end, then back at Eddie, her look almost apologising this time. He watched her push her trolley down to the next room. He looked past her to the end of the corridor but there was nothing to see. He thought he heard static, like the noise from a broken radio. He locked the door although he knew she wouldn’t be back in a hurry.
Coming out of the shower, back into the room, he had to remind himself where he was. Not Stirling. For a wanton moment he wished he was back there. But why stop there his mind suggested. He wanted to go back further, when they were all still alive. To his own place in Dublin and the scared scented smell of Edie beside him.
Dressing, Eddie picked up the remote control, pushed a button at random and his whole world changed. That was no reflection he was looking at. What he saw was an old picture culled from the archives that made him look much older, and even sadder than he was now, if that was possible. There was a moment of blissful ignorance when his brain couldn’t comprehend what the eye was seeing. Then the floodgates opened. Still beyond a shock no matter how much expected. His luck had held out to such a degree that he had started to believe it would never desert him. The look in the maid’s eye, the tiny sliver of recognition. Where was she now? He put his own eye to the spy hole, saw nothing. He looked back at the news on the TV and his face had thankfully disappeared. He should have listened, watched more. He would need to know what they knew, where they thought he was. They knew nothing, not really, but it wouldn’t take them long. Beads of sweat formed like thoughts of regret on his forehead. He wiped them away with the back of his hand.
The bag on the bed, the money packed away in different parts, the letter strapped like a bomb around his waist. Reception was quiet, he thought about breakfast but changed his mind. The girl at the desk was a thousand miles away, her hands working separately from everything else. She never looked at Eddie, what was one more face checking out?
He made it to the street, sucked in the polluted air and looked up and down the road for a sign. He saw a blue Volvo parked across the road, two men in the front, staring ahead, plastic coffee cups and empty crisp packets on the dashboard. As if they’d been there a while, all night even. Eddie looked where they were looking but there was nothing to see. He thought about approaching them. If they were looking for him, what were they waiting for? Why had they waited all night? Here I am, Eddie thought, I’m not going anywhere fast and I’m not even sure where I am going. And by the way, I’ve done nothing wrong. Well, maybe, just one little thing.
He was paralyzed with indecision. He couldn’t see how they could be waiting for anything or anybody but him. But they were and nothing that had happened to Eddie in his recent brief tragic life would ever compare to the strangeness of the next few minutes. It wasn’t what actually, physically happened that was surreal, more the bizarre coincidence of it. He was reminded both then, at that moment, and in the years ahead of that line in the John Carpenter movie, The Thing, when one of the supporting characters, on viewing the creature for the first time in all its glory, utters the immortal words ‘you’re fuckin’ kidding me.’
You’re fucking kidding me. No poetry there, none in his thoughts, just disbelief. He was looking at the car, at the faces of the certain policemen. They had the worn, creased faces of men too long in the trenches of lowlife criminal warfare. They stared out, eyes on stalks, craving sleep. Eddie moved several steps closer to them. He could think of no other option. He was tired of running, no, he was exhausted. Maybe he had done little wrong but he had managed to cause terrible carnage. He was the butterfly flapping its wings that causes a hurricane far away across the oceans. Moving closer and still they didn’t see him. What the hell were they looking at? In the quiet morning Eddie heard the click of a door opening. He looked in the sound’s direction. From a graceless building a woman emerged, bangles, bracelets, earrings, long green leather coat, she was searching in her large red bag. Eddie saw the faces of the men in the car change. Awake, alive now, preparing to move quickly. The woman turned in their direction, still looking in her bag, unaware of anything around her. A car horn blared and Eddie looked to see the sad sack face of a taxi driver mouthing obscenities in his direction. Eddie realised he was standing in the middle of the road. The car horn was the referee’s whistle signalling the start of the game. The woman looked up suddenly. She looked at Eddie first, then the two men in the car. Confusion surfacing like a crack in the road. Eddie, distracted for a moment by the passing taxi, was forced to move closer to the Volvo. He was now almost on top of them. One of the cops couldn’t fail to see him, he too confused. Eddie looked at the woman and a second later the thought hit him like a train, it couldn’t be.
The woman, just a woman at first, like many others, pretty enough, early forties maybe, dyed dark hair, betraying eyes that had seen more than they wanted. She looked at him with haunted terror, as if the very devil had finally found her after years on her trail. She couldn’t believe what she was seeing. Everything stopped, the worl
d had stopped. What was her name, her name, name?
‘Linda?’ the word dribbled from his mouth. No conviction there because it couldn’t be her. She was, she was just a mother. From a housing estate in Stirling, raising two kids on her own, going into town once a month for a brief respite from the mundane. But he had last seen her at a bus stop with a bag at her feet. And she had told him what?
‘Get out of here,’ she said. Car doors opening and the two policemen had entered the scene that in Eddie’s mind could not be happening.
‘Can I help you?’ the short, bulky cop with the Victorian moustache said. Eddie took a couple of steps back. They weren’t interested in him at all. They still couldn’t see it. He almost told them. Don’t you know who I am? On the pavement Linda Patterson, who couldn’t really be there, started walking more quickly, stupidly trying to pretend she was just an innocent passerby. Tall, lean machine cop number two with Robert Redford hair stopped her. She tried to pull away but he held her firm with one hand. He smiled greasy teeth and pulled her to the car, opening the back door with his free hand. Before he pushed her head down, she looked at Eddie one more pleading time.
‘I said, can I help you?’ asked Victorian moustache.
‘Alan Harding,’ said Eddie.
This time Redford became interested as well.
‘Don’t you know, don’t you people read the papers, watch the news, know your own cases?’ There were no such things as TV cops, Eddie realised, no Rebus, no Morse, no more. He could have disappeared again, could have stood in the middle of the road and waited for another car to run him down. The penny dropped in the slowest of slow-motion. Victorian looked at Redford and they realised the lottery had come in.
Eddie and Linda were together, briefly, again. They didn’t speak on their short journey. He had often thought of her, and always fondly. Thought of hiding out in her suburban life for a while, wanted her quiet, her dullness, her obscurity. He looked at the side of her painted face and she deliberately avoided looking at him. The only noise in the car was the low crackle of the police radio, and a few mumbled words exchanged between the two in front. And the same thought doing laps in Eddie’s head.
You gotta be fucking kidding me.
Mother and son briefly reunited Almost feeding time at the insane zoo. The only cages were in the minds of the lonely and the dispossessed who roamed the glazed halls of the old draughty building.
A few were allowed access to the TV for a couple of hours a day. Those who could understand what they were seeing at least. For some the noise and the colour was too much and they became upset, rocking intensely until someone came to take them away.
She was alone with it today. She was even allowed the remote control. The dramas, the fictions, the movies, all of those held little interest as they only seemed to show how crazy everybody and everything was. No different to in here. All murder, lust, jealousy, pain, little pleasure, and in the end, death. Nobody ever got away with anything. No, what really drew her in, captivated her, was the news. There was real sadness and injustice, real pity and heartache and sometimes redemption. It was early evening, the autumn day bringing late afternoon chill and black clouds threatening more than rain. She was tired, drifting to sleep although she had done nothing all day to make her so. They kept promising a day at the sea, a walk on the pier. Brighton. She dreamed of it often. Why did they say such things if they had no intention of doing them? They didn’t want to make them better, did they? Not good for business if the patients started feeling better.
The news was as it always was, the good and the bad, highlighted today, forgotten tomorrow. Edinburgh had been news for days, weeks now, drawn out of its sleepy touristy slumber to become suddenly notorious, dark deeds to match the dark stone and dark past. It was almost as if the city officials wanted to bring that back. There were murders everyday in every town and city but when there were several in quick succession, all close to each other and seemingly all related, the world sat up and took notice. She had been there before, she thought so anyway, thought she remembered it but it was one of those places so familiar from photographs that you thought you’d visited when in fact you never had.
The story always followed the same pattern of images, always the castle and Princes’ Street, no matter what the details. Three murders all in the space of a few weeks. Three men, two of them Irish, one a policeman, one a criminal, the other just a boy, a would-be criminal, a promising life of illicit activity cruelly cut short. She was dozing off, the light in the room was fading, the fluorescents would be turned on early this evening.
A photograph appeared on the screen, blown up from passport size so that now it looked a little blurred. The face of the man that connected all three murders. They didn’t call him the suspect, they never did, they just wanted to speak to him ‘in connection with recent events.’
No thought of sleep now. She sat rigid straight and her hands gripped the hard edges of the uncomfortable chair. She looked around, certain that a trick was being played on her. Was this an experiment, some new form of treatment? The face, so different and yet still the same seven year old boy kicking mud from his football boots on the back step. Hurrying him up before his dad came home. The photograph was gone in what seemed like a tiny moment, they had moved on to the next story. Was it real? Bad things still happening to him. Could the boy have spent all those years with bad luck still nipping at his heels?
Calm outside, no tears, no heaving of the soul. She waited all evening, then all night for the feeling to come. She ate all they fed her, let them wipe the dripping water on her chin. They whispered soft words in her ear as if she was still a child. They packed her tidily away in bed, patted her on the head, wished her sweet fairytale dreams. Maggie Brogan wore it all lightly, she supposed the years of pills and programs had smoothed most of the hard edges away. Enough anyway that they felt secure in sending her to such a soft place. The front door was minutes away, there were no bars, no armed security guards waiting to shoot her down. They obviously thought she was cured. She had no such feelings. No feelings at all. Her life before was somebody else’s. The woman that lay there, wide awake, had been created in late middle age. There was nothing before. The memories in her head were not her own.
The photograph on the screen repeated inside her head through the night. She couldn’t turn the memory machine off. The picture became spliced with images of an earlier existence. Coal fed housing estate with newly washed clothes soon splattered with the grim dust as soon as you opened the front door.
It all coagulated into a name.
Edward… Eddie… Her son.
Police station. Andy Fairweather. Feel it, touch it, taste it, see it. But it never really hits home until you actually say it. Hadn’t he told this story before? Maybe not from beginning to end. He had certainly never talked about Edie before. In the back of the car on the way here he had the relief of anticipation. He would tell it finally, all of it, gladly. In the sadness of Linda’s silence, the resolution to talk came to him. Answer all questions, accept all offers of help.
At the station they exited from separate car doors and Linda was swept away from him. He was escorted to the dull domain of the duty officer and all his details and possessions, including the letter, were taken. They would find the money, and little else. They left him in a cell to think, to sweat, to consider all options. But there was only one. The fact that he had offered himself into their care carved few cracks in the wall of contempt that was in front of him, behind him and at his sides. It took him a little time to understand why. How naïve, how innocent of him. Cop killer, might as well be a paedophile. There would little use in saying how he had liked, respected Harding and how he felt that feeling was returned.
He hadn’t killed the man. Or any of the others. That was the truth and nothing but. He knew that. That would come through, even in the possible beatings and the unsubtle threats. He could take a beating, he knew that. A lifetime had prepared him for that.
But no
thing could prepare him for the sound of his own voice. It was so strange, alien, weak, mewling. They dragged him from the cell even though he was more than willing. He felt the eyes of practically everyone in the station on him as he walked the eternal corridors to the interview room. All he was missing was the crucifix and the crown of thorns. He was guilty already. The first blow was landed when he asked about Linda. The words came out of his mouth with little thought. He was genuinely curious, sad about her. He still couldn’t believe it was her. It was just a slap on the side of the head but the surprise of it was more shocking than the pain. He thought he had reached some sort of safety zone when he was in the interview room. A lawyer supplied, in a brown shiny suit and hang dog eyes that barely made contact with Eddie. He turned over a new page in his yellow pad and prepared his elegant pen. There were four policemen in the room. No sign of the two that had picked them up. No doubt they were already embellishing their tale of how they had picked him up.
‘Eddie,’ the first words spoken with patronising sincerity by the man clearly in charge. He picked unconsciously at the hairs in his nose and roved the room like a hungry lion.
‘Eddie,’ he repeated, now standing behind him. Eddie didn’t turn around. He wasn’t scared, yet. He simply waited for his turn to tell his story. Then, surely then, they’d look at him in an entirely new light.
‘What?’ Eddie said, tried of the circling and the lack of questions. Another blow to the side of the head, which he never saw coming. Even the lawyer cowed beneath it, too startled to lodge the obvious protest.