Martin found an uncomfortable rigidness in his leg and relaxed his foot from pressing the brake-peddle to the floor. He still held the wheel, but the anger that had crushed his fingers to it had gone. His hands fell trembling into his lap and he sank back into the seat. With a faltering hand he clicked the stereo off and thanked fuck that the kids hadn’t been in the car.
He didn’t know what had happened. A man in an alleyway parallel to the car seemed caught mid motion, poised in a pose of running, before he turned on his heels and disappeared into the alley. Without the stereo the only sounds were the idle of the engine, the squeak of his windscreen wipers swiping mechanically back and forth shunting the rain from his vision, and the drum of a thousand fingers on his roof and buckled bonnet as the rain rattled down.
The bonnet was crumpled. He had hit something, yet there was no car, no motorbike, there was nothing before him that could have caused the collision. A bollard? One of those wrought iron posts made to look like a cannon. That would easily have caused the damage, but it wouldn’t have been in the middle of the road.
His heartbeat was drumming to the tempo of the falling rain, each quivering beat launched an unbearable shiver of anxiety through his nerves. He remembered that his headlights had caught something. The bonnet was buckled. He had hit something. The bonnet was buckled.
The rain drummed.
The wipers swayed.
His heart pounded.
He remembered the blur in his headlights.
It had hands that had risen up in defence. It had had a white face.
He had hit someone.
The perceptions of headlights, the rain, the wipers, the tick of the cooling engine, the tremble of his hands, the echo of his heart all clambered around his head, then scattered away from a pale hand that reached up from before the car and slammed onto the bonnet.
The slender feminine hand spread palm-flat, the fingers working and probing to gain some purchase. His tongue trembled in his slack mouth. His heart’s uncertain beat in his throat. The hand tensed, as if bracing against dragging its body upright and back to its feet, then slid on the slick surface and abruptly disappeared back over the edge out of sight.
Chapter Two
The light from his headlights reflected from the narrow corridor of parked cars and picked out the overbearing walls of the canyon of houses that reached up into the night around him. The shifting silver grain of the rain gave the world beyond the windscreen the quality of a scratchy black and white film playing out. The dark shape of a man ran and stopped in the mouth of an alley in the terrace, but Martin was distracted from registering his details by the girl that fled from that direction. The girl darted into the road so suddenly that by the time Martin had turned his head to catch sight of her again she was framed in his headlights. It was strange that he could see it so clearly in his memory, yet hadn’t had time to realise what had happened when it had actually occurred. He had hit the girl at forty-miles an hour in a thirty-zone with a hulking Volvo estate.
The tyres had gripped at the road and surfed the rain wash before biting the tarmac in a screeching slide that had joined another sound. A choral sound of infantile voices wailed then abruptly ceased as his bonnet crumpled with a cacophonous crunch and the car slammed to a halt. The howl had been unnatural, but then all the noises that played back to him from that moment frightened him with their intensity and their unexpectedness.
Martin sat in his car for what seemed like an eternity. The man that had been in the alley, who in Martin’s memory had been part of the same body of movement as the girl, was gone and had not returned. A weight suddenly lifted from him and all the detail of his world came flooding back around him as the cloying treacle movement of shock time dissipated into the vividness and urgency of real time. Martin prayed it hadn’t taken him the length of time it seemed to have taken for him to react. He wanted to think that if someone’s life hung in the balance, after the shock and the consideration of driving off, he would make every second of that time count.
He popped his seatbelt, flung his door open and hauled his considerable weight out of the seat. After the stuffiness of the car the rain was like needles of ice on his face and neck and soaked his white dress shirt to his sweat clammy body with the shock of a cold compress. He rounded the broad front of the vehicle and crouched at his victim’s side with a sickening nausea in his belly. The girl was sprawled before the car on the gritty tarmac that had been washed into a textured glass by the fall of rain. He whined a noise that he had never heard himself make and swore at the world.
Her pose looked painfully uncomfortable. Her arms and legs had been thrown into unnatural disarray from the impact. The front of the car stood poised over her fragile form, the bumper buckled in, the bonnet curled up like a lip snarled to bare the ragged teeth of its shattered radiator grille. The car was just a foot away from being parked on top of her body. The headlights poured over her dispassionately with their glaring white eyes, lighting her white skin and clothes into an overexposed whiteness.
She was luminous in the light except for the dark marks where she had been dirtied from her rag-doll roll along the road, and the blood that was lit into brilliant scarlet against the white of her flesh. It was like blood on snow. Martin dialled for an ambulance on his mobile phone and crouched between her and the lights to shield her from their glare. In the shade of his bulk the colour of her blood lost its vividness, yet her hair and skin maintained its unnatural whiteness.
Her eyelids twitched the smallest of movements.
Speaking on the phone, panting against his fear, he reached out a hand that trembled with shock and the bitter cold of being soaked on a November evening, and shielded her face from the rain. It could easily have been the fall of the rain drops that had given the impression of her eyelids moving, but he preyed to a God he didn’t believe in that they had moved by themselves. That she was indeed still alive. That he hadn’t killed her.
Her eyes flicked open with the suddenness of a trap being sprung.
He fell onto his rear in shock but was instantly sobered by the soaking chill of the ground. He repeated himself on the phone to the operator after a cry had made his last statement unintelligible and he returned to his haunches. The movement of her eyelids had startled him but it was the sight of her eyes that had toppled him.
The rain had driven the lids shut again and he questioned what he had seen. Giving a shaken approximation of his location to the robotic sounding operator he knelt forward, not caring that the slurry of rain water on the road was soaking him. He shielded her eyes again and they reopened.
Her eyes were as black as jet and made more striking by the white eyelids that framed them. There was no coloured iris, no white of sclera, seemingly just yawning ciliary muscles leaving only pupils with the draw of black holes contained behind each lid.
Ivory had been taken to the University College Hospital, a modern glass building opposite the gothic orange brick Victorian façade of St Pancras. Having two boys, it was a place that Martin was familiar with. He sat with his head in his hands and stared down into the glassy black surface of a cup of coffee. He had bought it from the A&E department’s vending machine, but it was too hot to hold let alone drink. He had bought a Mars bar too, more for comfort than for hunger, but he hadn’t eaten it. It was in his pocket, he didn’t want to be seen satiating his needs in these circumstances. He wanted to get out of there and escape, he thought of King’s Cross with its Platform 9¾ with the baggage trolley half-way through a wall on it’s way to the train to Hogwart’s. Finley had made him take him there countless times in the hope of spotting one of his favourite characters. Martin liked the idea of having a magical escape route, and not just tonight.
The polystyrene cup sat on the scuffed linoleum floor at his feet, staring back up at him with its well of black like one of the girl’s eyes. Those fully black eyes. What did it mean? Had she been on drugs? He had heard one of the nurse’s whisper ‘brain damage’. There was no
way of knowing for sure at the moment.
The ambulance staff had found a medical bracelet on her wrist. Beneath a black caduceus symbol and engraved statement that declared that it was the patient’s wish not to receive any medical examination or treatment whatsoever. There was a phone number that was to be called in case of emergency, and this had been done. Although this had made it difficult for the hospital staff to determine the extent of her injuries, the attending doctor had ruled that the patient’s wishes were to be respected and she would not receive an x-ray or even a stitch. Besides a nasty gash to her head, which had looked to Martin as if it really could do with a stitch, and some other grazes and bruises she had seemingly escaped serious injury. She was apparently responsive to a certain degree, with shakes and nods of her head to questions and suggested examinations and treatments. That had to rule out brain damage. Could her eyes really be like that naturally?
She was now sleeping off the shock within a curtained cubicle ahead of him, although the nurses were convinced that she was feigning sleep. The staff had found that the pockets of her three-quarter length white Mackintosh coat had contained a supply of condoms and a fat roll of money. There had been a business card printed with the word ‘EBONY’ with a mobile phone number beneath it. Martin had heard a nurse say the number on the card matched the one on the medical bracelet, and in response a nurse had mouthed, ‘Pimp?’ It struck Martin as strange that a pimp would take such responsibility for her care. Perhaps she was an illegal immigrant and her pimp wanted to ensure that she didn’t get caught or escape him through an accident such as this.
He struggled to accept that she was a prostitute. Curiously it didn’t alter her allure. Her startlingly white hair and skin and her contrasting black eyes were strangely engaging. He wondered whether it was the peculiarity of her appearance that attracted the porters, nurses and doctors to her side on what appeared to be a busy night for the A&E department.
Martin’s police questioning was already out of the way. He was relieved he hadn’t been drinking. He didn’t understand why the police had kept asking about a second vehicle, and was unsure exactly how many points he would gain on his license, or whether the police were going to charge him for dangerous driving. When the girl had recovered they would take her statement to see if her version of events corroborated with Martin’s explanation that she had run out in front of the car. If their stories didn’t match then the police would investigate the scene to determine his speed.
The girl had yet to speak. When the discomfort or pain from the nurses handling of her overcame the resistance of her pretend sleep she would shake or nod her head to questions. One of the nurses surmised that she was foreign and couldn’t speak English, and that fitted with Martin’s assumption that she was an illegal sex worker, maybe trafficked. He had half-watched a Panorama documentary on it whilst painting. Another nurse had suggested that to keep silent against the pain she must be experiencing from her injuries she had to be a mute. If that were the case then he didn’t understand what had caused the sharp ululation that had seemed to be formed from more than one voice when he had run her down. He had never imagined that tyres on tarmac could make such a human scream; one full of terror and defiance, as if the world cried out in grief and outrage at her being struck down.
The girl was clearly still in her teens, but the taboo freshness of her youth was saved from being a vulgar guilty attraction by her classical beauty, for with her eyes closed she had the poised majesty of any sculpted Greek or Roman face that he had studied in the British museum. He was unsure whether it was her young age, her abhorrent job, her current situation, the innocence that seemed to cling to her, or a combination of all these that drew upon his sympathy. He took it as a point against society that it had turned perfection into a whore, and corrupted such a rarity as beauty into something that could be bought and used to satisfy ones needs. He found some consolation in the fact that those that used her would do so within some guilty dirty secret that could only sully their experience, and they could ‘have’ her but never own her. He caught his own naivety; her pimp owned her.
The painfully skinny and scruffy young male nurse that Martin had relayed the incident to before the police had arrived, studied him with a look of curiosity and disbelief. He stalked over to Martin, a scarecrow in a tunic.
“I think you’re all finished here.”
Martin stood and rubbed his closely cropped ginger beard as he considered what he was going to ask from the nurse, knowing that he was going to push his luck. “If you don’t mind, I would like to see her.”
There was the briefest twitch of the man’s long but sparse eye brows. “I don’t think that’s appropriate, do you?” He suddenly wore a fixed smile. “You have shown your concern by staying around. I am sure it’s been noted.”
In the fantasy world that he only dared to play out in his head he punched the cynical nurse to the floor. “Seriously, I just want to see that she’s okay.”
“So would we, but considering she would only let us clean her up a little, even we don’t know how she is. And once her next of kin collects her I doubt we will be seeing her for a follow up exam.”
That idea made him want to see her even more. Martin sighed. “I just want to apologise to her. She deserves that at least. I want to let her know that I care that this has happened and that I didn’t just leave her.” The nurse gave an exaggerated nod, Martin was sure the nurse wanted to accompany the gesture with a roll of his eyes as he readied himself to reject Martin’s request. “Look if you’re worried I might put pressure on her to corroborate my story or that I might bribe her in some way then stand in the cubicle with me. I am not ashamed of someone seeing my guilt. If I did want to bribe her or intimidate her then I could sneak back later. Hospitals aren’t known for their security, you know.” Martin huffed a half-laugh, trying to make himself sound reasonable. “Besides it looks like she earns more in a night than I earn in a week. I don’t think that what I could offer her would sway her when she can probably quite rightly sue my arse off.” He hadn’t thought of that until he had said it and hoped it wouldn’t come to that.
The nurse did roll his eyes now as he motioned Martin towards the cubicle, as if Martin was going to give him cause for regret. The nurse made a triangular parting in the curtain and poked a thumb over his shoulder. “In you go then.”
Martin jogged the few paces to the curtain, but was stopped by the nurse holding up a cautioning hand. “You’re good at making a reasoned point but you might want to remember that she might forgive you in there, but I sincerely doubt her ‘next of kin’ will. Personally I would not hang around for him to arrive.”
Martin’s guts chilled and loosened and a sense of urgency overtook him. He stepped hastily beyond the curtain, he would have to make this quick – he didn’t relish the idea of that encounter.
He was confronted with his victim.
The bare strip lighting lit her flesh, less than his car headlights had, but her skin and hair still held a strikingly brilliant luminescence. Her eyes were closed. Martin approached the bed with a quietened step and measured pace. He realised there was a reverence in his step that he hadn’t felt since the days when he had followed his father up to the altar in church. He had abandoned his father’s catholic faith in his teens mainly because he was an atheist but also because it hurt his father. The powerful architecture of ‘God’s’ houses of stone and coloured glass, and the magical ritual thrall of the Eucharist had always created awe within him, and he felt that same awe now. He threw a conscious look at the nurse who stood watch over him, but found that the nurse’s attention had been drawn in on the sleeping girl.
Martin rested his hands on the raised chrome cot sides in the same way his father had done with the brass rail around the Holy Mother to support him as he dipped down to one knee and genuflected, it was ridiculous that the moment seemed to conjure the memory of such a gesture. He struggled with a need to laugh at the connections his mind was making, esp
ecially now he had no God, but all thought of laughter was banished as he realised the blue and purple bruising on one side of her face and a puckered crimson break in her skin that ran across half her forehead above one eye. Martin stole himself against the realisation that he could have been staring at a corpse – and it would have been his fault. He clenched his hands against a tremor of guilt, which quickly became a start as her gently rested eyes flicked open. Then there was fear as her obsidian eyes stared into him.
Faced with the precipice of the deep fall into her eyes, memories were conjured of how he had felt as a child when his father had told him that God was not only watching over him but could see into him, and all his sins were made bare. Martin felt shame before those black eyes, but it wasn’t the child’s guilt for touching himself and thinking about Lilly Mcgreggor round the corner or Mrs Jenkins tight fitting blouse, as an adult it was shame for driving angry and for not seeing the poor girl in time.
“I’m sorry…” his voice quavered. “I didn’t see you…”
Her black raven stare fluttered as she blinked several times in close succession as his words seem to bring her around to some level of consciousness. Her head turned a little towards him and her pale lips blushed with the faintest hint of pink, seemingly delicate like petals, parted into a thin fragile smile. He was so surprised that she might smile at him the gesture had an intimate quality. Curiously she did seem genuinely warmed by the apology and pleased to see him. Then he remembered the man in the alley. Perhaps he had saved her from something worse than a car accident tonight. The man had seemed to be chasing her.
This unexpected reaction to Martin’s presence appeared to cause the nurse to shift uncomfortably from one foot to the other. He didn’t understand the discomfort the young man seemed to experience from this smile being aimed at Martin. Surely the gesture exonerated him in some small way. Something blossomed in his stomach in response to that smile. Something he didn’t recognise. It was warm and light, yet dense like candy floss.
Ivory Page 2