by Steve Mosby
And neither will Graham. He never made that appointment. He knew that Amy was making it work with me, or trying to, and he wasn’t going to get in the way of that, even if he wanted to. And I guess he was annoyed with her, in his own way. There had been times since they’d slept together when he’d been there, again and again, to listen to her and try to help her through whatever stupid shit I’d done that week, but there was no way that could continue forever, not considering how he felt. Even good friends lose their patience with you occasionally. That day, he thought fuck it. Perhaps, having found out how needy she could be, he might have started to empathise with me in some small way. He spent the day with Helen instead, and thought about Amy only once or twice.
So: Amy went to meet Kareem because of me, but she went on her own because Graham didn’t go to meet her, even though he’d told her that he would. That’s what it comes down to; we both had our parts to play in letting her down.
I imagine her sitting in that café, enjoying her first cup of coffee as she waits for Graham, and then she becomes increasingly nervous and undecided as he fails to arrive. She sends that text message and starts thinking: should she go alone, or shouldn’t she? Deep down, she knows he’s not coming. That’s the second cup of coffee. It would be so much easier just to go home, but the thought of that is crushing. This is something that has been keeping her going, giving her hope for our relationship, and going home is defeat. It’s an emotional back-flip over the edge of a cliff.
Amy made her decision. She went on her own that day, and that was the last she ever saw of us.
‘Close your eyes,’ Graham said.
‘What?’
‘Close your eyes,’ he said. ‘And keep writing.’
The man did as he was told, but he was badly frightened now: shaking; his face looking like he was dreaming, all full of nervous twitches and concentration. And even in this extreme state, the pen kept skittering across the page in front of it, steady and even, recording each and every one of these terrible sensations like some kind of fucking polygraph. Graham stared at him for a couple of seconds, watching the words come, spilling across the empty lines, slowly filling the page. The man was like a machine. Like some kind of camera. The sense-data was coming in, being processed, and then out came the text before him. A permanent record.
How quick was he, Graham wondered as he raised the gun and aimed it at the side of the man’s head. Was the translation instantaneous? He took a good, solid two-handed grip, fingers uncurling and then curling back, and he thought: is this man quicker than a bullet? Will the split-second feeling of his skull opening, his brain rupturing – will the beginnings of that make their way onto the page? And, if so, what will become of the person who reads that?
Graham closed one eye and thought: goodbye, Jason.
‘Wait,’ the writer said.
Graham kept his eye closed.
‘Wait,’ the writer said again. He licked his lips. ‘I know what you want to do, but you have to give me a second. There’s something you need to see.’
‘What?’
‘An e-mail,’ the writer said. ‘Someone just sent it to me. There’s something there that you really need to see. That you should see, really, before you decide what you’re going to do.’
Graham stared at him. The man still had his eyes shut, and his head was nodding slightly, as though he was counting something in his head.
He stared at him for another couple of seconds.
‘Show me.’
The writer opened his eyes. He looked like someone coming out into the light from a long, dark tunnel. With his free hand trembling a little, he reached out for the mouse on the computer table in front of him, and Graham – still aiming the gun – said:
‘Slowly.’
The writer moved the cursor and the black screensaver vanished. Hidden underneath it was an empty e-mail.
‘It’s not the message you need to see,’ he said. ‘It’s the attachment.’
He clicked on a couple of options. The screen changed view to reveal a page of text and the writer scrolled for a second and then pointed at a section of it. ‘Here. This bit.’
Graham leaned across and looked at what was there.
He was watching the big man: Jack. Jack couldn’t work the skirt down over her kicking legs, and her voice was getting louder and more desperate – No-o-o! – and so he punched her so hard between her legs that the whole bed shook.
Jack watched her to see whether there was going to be any more fighting. When it was obvious that there wasn’t, he started moving again. He finished undressing her, throwing the skirt to one side, and then he climbed on top of her, his elbows pressing down hard on the inside of her upper arms, knocking her palms away from her red, tear-stained face. His hands pulled her head right back by the hair. In this surrender position, with her pinned there and sobbing, he started to rape her.
I was watching the man with the gun. It was still pointing at me, but there was no conscious thought attached. He was wrapped up in the text on the screen, lost in it, and – although he probably wouldn’t have known it – he had started to cry.
I had seconds. If I was going to get out of here alive, then this was going to be my only chance to do it. He was going to kill me, and I wasn’t a killer – not really – but there was no way I was going to let him hurt me: if it was me or him, then it was him.
The gun was wavering in the air. Before I could think about the danger, or what would happen if I couldn’t overpower him, I grabbed it and started to fight.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
That was it: the end.
I looked away from the papers on the desk. My heart was beating too quickly and my mind felt bruised from both the impact of the message and the medium through which it had been communicated. Other than that, all I felt was a kind of dreadful, empty calm.
I was already putting it together. The writer must have attacked Graham while he was distracted with the text on the screen, and tried to wrestle the gun from him – and maybe he’d succeeded or maybe it had been an accident, but whichever, Graham had got himself shot in the head. The writer knew Marley had been killed and he would have suspected from what Graham had told him that I would be making my way here eventually, so he called Jack, the pins and knives man. They checked out Marley, found him dead and then staked the place out, or maybe Jack did that on his own. I arrived. Jack died. And then I follow Graham’s trail here and get to read what happened. I get to discover the reason behind all of this, and it fucking sucks.
There was an awful inevitability to it all: a sense of closure that left only me hanging, and that was something I thought I could take care of now. There wasn’t much else left for me.
The writer?
The fact that I hadn’t been attacked while I read the papers was telling. The man wasn’t a killer; he was a coward. He wasn’t even a hardcore criminal. So maybe Jack had told him to lie low for a while: that he’d take care of me, clean things up and let the guy know when it was safe to come out. Or maybe he’d been staking out Marley’s place, too. He knew I’d killed Jack and wanted nothing to do with me. Perhaps he was on a plane to somewhere tropical even now. Wherever he was, he wasn’t here. Looking around, I had no great desire to be here either. I picked up the papers in front of me, folded them neatly and slipped them into my pocket.
And then I left.
But before I did, I took a quick look around. There were hundreds of notepads here: thousands of pages of observation and experience. Most of it was trivial and inconsequential, but who was I to judge? Most things are, including me. What occurred to me was what a shame it was that all this was going to waste. For a moment the books looked like nothing so much as lives held in stasis: rich, vital moments trapped between covers, just waiting to be tripped into and felt. It seemed a shame, and I didn’t know whether to take a match to the place or call Dennison. In the end, I did the latter, from a payphone in the street outside. There was no answer, so I left a message givin
g him the address and a couple of words of caution – dead body in the bathtub; possibly dangerous tenant – but there was a life’s work of lives to be saved in the flat and I didn’t think a few little details like that would deter him.
Then, for what it was worth, I went and checked out of the hotel.
And I went home.
The first thing I did when I got in was check the messages on my answerphone. It was the same two messages as before, but I listened to them again anyway.
Okay, I’m not the only loose end.
My job. As I listened to Nigel prattle on, with his odd inflections and even odder assumption that I might give a shit, my job had never felt more meaningless to me. They had paid me for a month of work I hadn’t done, and that was all I needed to know. It was possible that they’d pay me for another month – I was, after all, a troubled young man – but frankly I couldn’t have cared less. I listened to Nigel’s voice and I knew it was intended to sound like some kind of authority – something that would make me feel guilty, or bring me to heel, or make me worried – but it didn’t. I received those emotions, but they were filtered through dream logic; they were feelings I might have experienced in another life and, now that I’d woken up, they meant next to nothing to me.
Fuck him, fuck them. I pressed [NEXT] before the end of the message.
Beep.
‘Hi Jason, it’s Charlie.’
Oh, yes – there was Charlie to think about. Poor Charlie, who practically idolised me. And what did I do to her? I used her as bait to track down a paedophile, killed him, unburdened half my soul to her and then abandoned her. And after all that, without me even asking, she had covered up evidence of a serious crime on my behalf. What was her current reaction to me?
‘It’s Sunday night,’ she told me again. ‘I’m just calling because I hope you’re okay. I don’t know what happened yesterday – or what I did wrong – but I’m sorry, whatever it was. And I understand; it’s okay.’
She understood. It was okay. In fact, it was possible that she’d even done something wrong. As I pressed [STOP] I thought that if enough of the women in my life got together they might realise that I was the common fucking denominator.
‘I wanted to let you know-’
Click
So: Charlie. Turning up to meet me with make-up on. She was more attractive than she realised – and nicer, too. For fuck’s sake, she’d been sitting there, listening to my worries. She’d encouraged me to talk about Amy and my other problems, and all the time she was doing that she’d had makeup on. Either that, or she’d had her hair cut. I couldn’t even remember which it had been. It was pretty obvious that she deserved better than someone like me.
But she’d be okay, I thought as I headed upstairs with the gun in my hand. My job, too. They’d both survive without me. In themselves, they weren’t loose ends so much as frayed edges. Once you got rid of me, they took care of themselves.
I walked into the study.
Everything was still just as fucked up as Walter Hughes’ friends had left it. The hard drive of my computer was in a couple of clunky pieces on the floor, and one of the guys had pulled the monitor off base and smashed it to shit, no doubt unaware that his boss was about to offer to pay for any damages. Compensation would have undermined the point of destroying my property a little bit. But then I’d gone and killed Hughes, so it was a moot point anyway.
I kicked a bit of circuitry and thought about the internet. The news on the coach was that the damage was starting to repair itself. Where that wasn’t the case, IT firemen were busy pouring gushing streams of water over the flames, trying to limit the spread. Nobody had a clue what had happened, but the consensus was that it seemed to have stopped. For the moment.
I kept a few pictures of Amy in the study. They were pretty much undisturbed: lodged on a shelf in the computer desk. Actually, they weren’t just pictures of Amy: I was on some of them, too; Graham and Helen; Jonny and the guys we’d grown up with. Amy probably wasn’t even on half of them, but I took the whole bundle through to the bedroom.
There, I spread the pictures out, filtering away the irrelevant ones and putting the ones I liked best out on the pillows, the top of the duvet. I covered the bed in them. Shots of us on holiday. Shots of us at New Year’s. Just tens of photographs. Graduation. Engagement. Pictures taken in bars, of long, cheering tables we were at; you had to pick us out, and even then it barely looked like us. I was crying the whole time, touching her face as I let them fall. One. Ten. Thirty. I remembered all of them. Ask me for fifty different occasions when Amy had smiled at me and I’d be stuck by double figures, but I remembered each of these clearly. They were obvious examples. Only God knows all of the times she smiled when I forgot to take a photograph.
When the bed was covered, I lay down on it. Everything shifted and slid, but that was okay. First one elbow, then onto my back. I still had the gun, and – when I was settled – I put the barrel into my mouth, tasting the salt and grease and oily tang of it. The ceiling was not as interesting as I would have liked. Looking down from it, surrounded by these photographs, I imagined I looked pretty good, at least symbolically, but looking up I felt very little at all.
At this angle, the top of my head would be blown out all over the wall at the head of the bed. That seemed to be the general angle. I didn’t know about the gases from the barrel. Maybe they would blow my cheeks apart, scorch my throat, burn my lips. Perhaps the barrel would become hot from the bullet and, even as my head went out on the wall, my mouth would be burned and hollowed and blistered. Nothing is ever as clean as in the movies.
Goodbye Amy, I thought, and pulled the trigger.
EPILOGUE
Things are better now. Not perfect by any means, but better. It’s four months on, and there’s a strange kind of poetry to that: it was four months after Amy disappeared when I found her, and now, four months later, I’m beginning to find my feet. I have a new job. It’s nothing special – just grunt work at the moment – but it keeps me busy and keeps me sane and, most importantly of all, it doesn’t involve fucking people over – or at least not directly – and so despite the grease and dirt I get to have an illusion of my hands being clean.
Every night I go home to the house that Amy and I used to share. I’ll be selling it soon and moving somewhere different: not a nicer place or a worse one, just different. I’m okay where I am, but I made the suggestion to Charlie and she seemed to think it was a good idea. She notices how I am much more than I do. I have good days and bad days, just like everybody, and I think it helps that I got a lot of my grieving out of the way a long time ago. There’s still the guilt to deal with, but I’m as resilient as the next person and, when I need to, I can lock all that shit away and pretend it’s not there.
Oh yeah – Charlie.
Well, she’s here some of the time. We’re still just friends, but neither of us is with anyone else and it seems likely that we’ll get together at some point. There’s a closeness between us, and it increases every day. She’s one of those types of people: the kind who seem to have infinite patience. I’m in awe of her in so many ways. She deserves better, of course; I’m still very much aware of that. But I’m also determined to change it. One day, if I work at it hard enough, maybe it won’t be true anymore. Perhaps she’ll deserve me. Stranger things have happened.
And the gun?
Well, I still have it. Sometimes I take it out of the drawer in the bedroom and look at it. I run my hands over it and imagine what it would be like to load it with bullets and shoot myself. I’d fired it precisely twice. The first had killed Walter Hughes’ bodyguard: an accident. The second, more deliberate, had killed Hughes himself. And then, four months ago, I’d fired it into the top of my mouth, expecting to die. That had been incredibly deliberate. But there were no bullets left. The gun was empty. It had gone click click click click.
I’d rested there, wanting to kill myself and yet totally unable. It felt like insult added to fucking injury, and
I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. In the end, I laughed.
Eventually, the curtains lightened and the shadows in the room began to fade out. Birds started singing outside. At some point I fell asleep. When I woke up it was afternoon, and the photographs were scattered everywhere and there was blood from my face all over the pillows and the top of the sheets. I’d tried to kill myself – I really had – but the bruised side of my head was throbbing too much for me to be anything other than woefully alive. I’d even fucked up my own suicide, and now I was going to have to pay the price: the day ahead.
I cleaned myself up as best I could, but I could tell that the cuts weren’t going to heal on their own: they weren’t bleeding much anymore, but I’d need stitches. Whether I would go and get them was another matter entirely; maybe I would and maybe I wouldn’t. For the moment, I balled up an old T-shirt, dabbed at myself every so often, and made my way downstairs.
I think I mentioned: I had this ritual.
I started a pot of coffee percolating in the kitchen, clicked some bread down into the toaster and got the milk and butter out of the fridge. I couldn’t find anything relaxing enough on the crappy little radio-cassette we kept on the cabinet, so I settled for silence. I just sat down at the kitchen table, the gun in front of me, waiting for my late breakfast to be ready and imagining that Amy was asleep upstairs. She’d come down in a bit, but for now she was only half-awake. Drifting; sleepy.
But I couldn’t do it. She wasn’t there. There was just a load of fucking photographs. I’d been upstairs all night and morning, and she’d been conspicuous by her absence.