by Paul Cleave
Everybody turns toward Melissa.
“Go ahead,” Raphael says.
She clears her throat. “Well, this referendum. .” she says, and a murmur goes through the crowd, a unifying sound that tells her she’s touched a hot topic, one where everybody in this room is on the same side.
Raphael puts his hands up and waves his palms down slightly. The crowd goes silent. “Carry on,” he says.
“Well, this referendum coming up, we all get the chance to vote on the death penalty,” she says. “My sister, she was murdered,” she says, and she was murdered by a policeman who raped her first, killed her second, and took his own life for thirds. Some would call that a hat trick. She would call it a piece of bad luck followed by a piece of even worse luck followed by a piece of great luck. She doesn’t mention any of this. “And I’m thinking, if anybody deserves the death penalty, it’s Joe Middleton,” she says. “His trial starts next week, and trials can be tricky things. I mean, he deserves to die, that’s what I-”
“He totally deserves to die,” somebody calls out, a woman on the opposite side of the circle whose face is red and angry and hasn’t seen makeup in a long time, her black hair long and messy.
“I second that,” somebody else says, this time a guy a few seats away. Everybody pauses, waiting for more outbursts, and there’s only one more, a Kill the fucker from a guy two seats down.
“Go ahead,” Raphael says.
“Well, what happens if he gets away with it? What happens if he pleads that he’s insane and the jury lets him go? What then? He goes free? That’s not fair. Not fair to me, to my sister, not fair to many others in this room. What do we do then to make sure he gets justice?”
“It’s a good question,” Raphael says, and Melissa knows it is. It’s why she asked it.
“With a simple answer,” a man further along the circle says. “We kill him.”
Another man stands up. “Yeah, we kill him. Hunt him down and shoot the bastard.”
Raphael puts out his hand. “Sit down,” he says. “Please, we’re not here to condone violence.”
“We should be,” the woman who first spoke out says, and Melissa studies the people speaking up, adding them to her list of possible partners. At this rate everybody in the room would probably be willing to help. She could have an army.
“That’s not what this is about,” Raphael says. “Miss. . what’s your name?”
“Stella,” Melissa says. “I couldn’t handle it if he got away.”
“Well, Stella, he won’t get away,” Raphael says, his voice hardening, and in that moment Melissa forgets about the others in the room because she has a strong sense about Raphael. It’s the same sense she got last year when she first met Joe Middleton. It’s something she’s developed over the years since her university professor raped her, a sense that was drummed into her as she lay pinned and bleeding beneath him. Raphael is her guy. She can sense it. Some people can see poets inside people, or a sense of peace; others have gaydar. Her thing is seeing the anger inside people, and there’s definitely something dark inside Raphael, the exact something dark she was hoping to find tonight.
“But if he does? If he’s found not guilty?” she asks.
“Then we get him,” somebody from across the circle says, but Melissa doesn’t look in that direction, doesn’t see who the voice belongs to, because she only has eyes for Raphael now. Raphael with his blue eyes behind the designer glasses staring back at her, Raphael with the pulse in his forehead and a tightening jaw. Yes, there are bad thoughts behind those bright blue eyes. No doubt about it.
“He’ll be in protective custody, or he’ll be placed somewhere nobody knows. It hurts,” she says, “it hurts missing her and if, if Joe were to get away I’d kill myself, I’d. . I’d just kill myself.”
Fiona puts an arm around her and Melissa fights the urge to shrug it off and shoot her. Most of the people in the room are leaning forward now.
“Stella,” Raphael says, and Melissa holds a hand up to her face and Fiona grips her a little tighter.
“I need a bathroom,” she says, and she slips out from beneath Fiona’s arm and gets up and rubs her belly and heads toward the back of the hall. People try talking all at the same time. She can hear footsteps following her. She makes it to the bathroom and splashes water onto her face to streak her makeup so it looks like she’s been crying. Then Fiona comes into the room.
“Are you okay, honey?”
“I’m fine,” Melissa says, and wipes at her face.
“Are you sure?”
“Positive.”
“Raphael said it was time for things to start wrapping up,” she says. “Everybody seems worried about you, and I get the idea you’re not the first person to have run in here crying. Can I get you a coffee? Oh,” she says, then looks at Melissa’s stomach, “perhaps some water instead?”
“I’m fine.”
“The others are talking about a protest on Monday,” her new best friend says. “They’re going to the courthouse to support the death penalty. I want to go, but don’t think I will. I should go, but. . but I think it’s all just too much for me. I’m not sure if that makes sense. Does it?” And, without waiting for an answer, she goes into her next question. “Can I walk you to your car?”
“I want to clean up first,” Melissa says.
“I don’t mind waiting.”
“I’m fine,” she says. “Really, please, don’t worry about me. I think I just. . just need to be alone for a little bit.”
“Of course,” Fiona says. “I know how you’re feeling.” She opens the door, pauses in it, and turns back. “I don’t really know if I got anything from any of this,” she says, “but I think I’ll come back next week. Will I see you here too?”
Melissa nods.
“Maybe bring your husband,” Fiona says.
“I will.”
“Okay, well, I’ll see you later,” she says, as both women walk out of the bathroom.
Others are heading their way to use the bathroom, others are heading out of the hall, Raphael is stacking chairs. Some are drinking coffee. Everyone she passes stops to talk to her to ask if she’s okay. She tells them she’s fine. The others are talking about the protest on Monday. She has left her jacket over her chair, so she walks toward it and toward Raphael.
“Are you okay?” Raphael asks, and up close he smells of musky aftershave and reminds her a little of her father-only a much handsomer version. It makes her realize how much she misses her parents.
“I’m sorry about my outburst,” she says.
“I’m sorry about your sister.”
“I’m sorry about your daughter.”
Raphael nods. No doubt he’s sorry too. He carries on stacking chairs, but does it in a way that he doesn’t put his back to her.
“Do you ever think about how it would feel to hurt the man that took her away?” Melissa asks.
The chair Raphael has in midair he returns back to the floor. He puts both hands on the back of it and faces her. “Let me ask you something,” he says. “Why are you here?”
“Why is anybody here?” she asks. “To find some sense of understanding. Some closure.”
“There is no closure,” he says. “Often there’s no understanding either.” He stares at her and she stares back, and she’s impressed at how well he’s hiding the darkness behind his eyes, but it’s there. No doubt about it. “But these are just things we say because we need to hear them. What I’m specifically asking is why are you here? Who was your sister? Was she a victim of Joe’s?”
“Yes,” she says, and immediately knows she has made a mistake. He’s going to ask her who her sister was.
“Who?” he asks.
“Daniela Walker,” she says, going with Daniela since she met and killed Daniela’s husband earlier today, which means there’s one less person to be able to call her a liar.
He doesn’t pause, doesn’t show any signs that he knows she’s lying. “I’m sorry about Daniela,
” he says.
“Why did you really start this group?” she asks.
Now he does pause, just for a fraction, but long enough to make her doubt whatever he’s going to say. “To help people,” he says. “Why do you think I started it?”
“To help people,” she says. She wishes she could just come out and ask him to help her kill Joe. He’s the perfect candidate. Would it be that simple? “I guess I came along because I wanted somebody to tell me that no matter what happens, Joe will be brought to justice.”
His jaw tightens again as he slowly nods. “He will be.”
“Are you voting for the death penalty?” she asks.
“Yes,” he says. “We’ve been organizing a protest over the last month,” he says. “We spoke about it while you were in the bathroom. You’re welcome to come along.”
“You’re protesting against it? I thought you said-”
“We’re protesting against the people who are protesting against it,” he interrupts. “There’s going to be a gathering outside the courthouse of people not wanting the death penalty reinstated. We’re going to be there to be heard too. These people, these humanitarians, they have no idea what it’s really like.”
“Yeah, I know,” she says. “And if the bill is passed and Joe is sentenced to death, it could take ten years.”
“That’s quite possible,” he says. “Probably even likely.”
“Can you live with that?” she asks.
He frowns and angles his head slightly. “Are you suggesting an alternative?”
“I’m just after closure,” she says, treading carefully.
“And what does your husband think?”
“He left me,” she says. “He says I haven’t been the same since my sister died.”
He looks her up and down, at the pregnant stomach, and no doubt he’s thinking her husband is a bastard. “When Angela died,” he says, “Janice left me too. A thing like that, well, marriages often don’t survive.”
“If you could be the person to do it,” she says, “if you were the one to pull the lever or push the button or do whatever it is to finish Joe, would you do it?”
“No,” he says, and he picks the chair back up and puts it into the stack. “I wish I could, but it’s not who I am.”
She rubs at her belly again. This has been a huge waste of time. Three days left and fate led her to the wrong place. It’s her own fault for believing in fate. And she feels stupid for seeing something in Raphael that obviously isn’t there.
“I should be going,” she says.
“It was nice meeting you,” he says.
She grabs her jacket and heads to the back of the hall. Her stolen umbrella has been stolen. She wonders if that’s the universe finding balance. Others are leaving the parking lot-some are standing under the edge of the building chatting, and some of them are smoking. Others are still inside using the bathroom and sipping coffee. It’s still pouring with rain, and the wind has picked up and tugs at the umbrellas of the others out here. She walks carefully to her car and unlocks it and gets in, the jacket protecting her upper body, but her pants are soaking wet. She hates driving in the pregnancy suit, so she takes it off, an awkward procedure that takes about half a minute because she didn’t take her jacket off first. Nobody can see her through all the rain inside her dark car, and even if they could nobody would know what she was doing.
She gets the bump off and tosses it into the backseat, and she’s getting ready to remove the wig when the passenger door swings open and Raphael climbs in.
“So, Stella,” he says, “looking at her stomach and then at the bump in the backseat, the bump that still has her gun inside it, “how about you tell me why you’re really here?”
Chapter Seventeen
The fresh jumpsuit is a little stiff, washed with too much starch and not enough care and certainly without any love. It scratches at my neck. I keep trying to adjust it. Shower time is over and we’re an hour away from being put back into our cells, but I’ve come back to mine anyway to be away from Caleb Cole and his thoughts, and to spend some time alone with my own.
I pick up one of the books Melissa gave me, not the same one I started reading earlier. There are six books in total. The people on the covers with flawless skin and defined muscles all look happy because none of them are facing a possible hanging. I scan through the book looking for Melissa’s message. There are no pencil marks. No marked pages. I flick through the third one, no longer reading, just looking for signs, but still no dog-eared pages, no slips of paper coming out, no underlined passages. Same with the fourth book. Same with the fifth. There is no message here. Same with the sixth. The books have all been read before. The spines are broken and the pages a little dirty.
I head out into the common area. The only privileges we have right now are TV privileges. One TV for thirty people doesn’t seem like much of a privilege, but it certainly helps with the boredom. The buttons have been removed from the set and the remote control lives somewhere beyond our cell walls, which means there are no arguments between us as to what we want to watch. The remote will occasionally make an appearance in the hand of a prison guard if there’s something on that he thinks we may want to watch. Which there never is.
Tonight is the news, but me, my cellmates, we are the news, so we don’t bother watching it since it’s nothing more than a window into our lives, or the lives of people just like us. It’s on, just footage blurring into more footage the same way the tedium of jail blends into more tedium. Colors and shapes of people doing shit, getting shot, going to war, and stealing from the economy. Ads come and go-pills for diabetes, pills for blood pressure, pills for getting an erection, pills that I’d need too if I were to try touching the women in those ads. All those guys need to do to wake up a flagging erection is to corner somebody half their age.
A current-events show comes on after the news. There’s a stage with gray carpet and blue walls, and in the middle stands a man behind a podium. He’s talking to the camera. After a minute he’s joined by two more men who have podiums of their own, one to the left of the stage and one to the right. They walk out to what can only be described as unenthusiastic applause, as if the people in the audience were dragged in from jury duty.
The guy on the right is the prime minister. He’s a bald guy in his late forties and the thing about bald guys is I don’t like them. I didn’t vote for him. I didn’t vote for anybody. The other guy I have no idea who he is, but must be the guy wanting to be prime minister, but if I did vote I’d vote for him on account of him having hair. And this is where the world doesn’t make sense. A bald guy running the country, and yet I’m the one in jail?
Santa Suit Kenny is playing cards with Roger Small Dick. They’re a few yards down from me sitting opposite each other at a table. They’re playing memories, where all the cards are shuffled and laid facedown and they have to try to pick them up in pairs. I’m pretty sure it’s a metaphor for their future if both men get out of here. Picking up children in pairs. Lying them facedown. Making memories. But who am I to judge what goes on in the privacy of somebody else’s basement? Caleb Cole is watching me while I try to make out it’s no big deal that I’m being watched. Others are reading books, which makes no sense because they could just as easily read them in their cells.
Edward Hunter is off being medicated somewhere, probably preparing for his own trial coming up later this year. There are benches along the side of the room where people are sitting and smoking.
The volume of the TV is low and the subject matter dull, until I hear the moderator, a good-looking guy with thick, brown hair that must be dyed, say “People are angry at crime. The homicide rate is bloody appalling,” he says, and over the years I’ve seen this guy on TV it’s become apparent he likes to hear himself swear, it’s obvious he feels the word bloody adds a gravitas to his words and labels him as a Go get ’em kind of guy. Sometimes he’ll use the word bastard too. He’s working his way up to saying fuck-knuckle.
“Is the next government prepared to spend more money on law enforcement, more money on prisons, and more importantly, is the government elected this year prepared to follow the will of the people if that will turns out to be a want for capital punishment? Why don’t you answer first, sir,” he says, looking at the leader of the opposition.
“Well, first of all,” the leader of the opposition says, “I think the current government has done an extremely poor job on crime,” he says, frowning at the moderator and then at the camera. “As prime minister, first thing I’ll do is divert more funding to the current police force, and we’ll start recruiting drives because we need more officers,” he says, “because at the moment our men and women in the police are overworked, underpaid, exhausted, and leaving.”
“Yes, yes,” the moderator says, “but your party has made those promises before and when given the chance, never followed through. Just as the current party made those promises before the last election.”
“The current party has let us all down,” the man answers, ignoring the first part of the moderator’s statement. “And that’s why we need a change.”
“But it was your party,” the prime minister says, and he points at the guy running against him, “who cut funding to the police department five years ago.”
“That’s completely untrue!” his opponent says, as if he’s just been accused of stealing candy from a baby and groping its mother.
The moderator nods and holds up his hands. “Gentlemen,” he says, “please, all in good time. Now, the same day people are voting for a new prime minister they’re also voting on-”