Mud Pie

by Emma Lee Bole

  Chapter Thirty-two

  The Silk Road

  The rain-blurred carriageway was unreeling through the window of Charlotte’s dinky car. I stared at the beating wipers and surreptitiously nursed my arm in its sling, for my shoulder was aching again, and I didn’t want to tell Charlotte.

  I was thankful for the burbling of Silk FM, because I could think of nothing to say. Once I’d inquired about Hugh (sectioned and under suicide watch), and her parents (Daddy wished he was dead), to ask further about her family would only be hurtful: to ask how she felt would be foolish; and to make small talk, plain tactless.

  Nevertheless, I said again, “I’m sorry, Charlotte.”

  “Stop it.” Her lips barely moved. Hands clenched on the wheel.

  “What does the psychiatrist say?”

  “He spouts jargon over the phone. I suppose we’ll find out more when we meet him.”

  “Yes.” The ‘we’ was Charlotte and Daddy. Not me.

  “DI Cole said they’d tested the powder you gave them.” Charlotte’s words were slow, reluctant. “It was something with lots of P’s in. PCP, I think. Not common, she said, even in London, very rare around here. Thank God, she said. Have you heard of it?”

  “Angel dust,” I said, appalled. Ketamine’s older, nastier, more lethal brother. Angel dust, soft as baby powder, that could turn a man into a tormented machete-wielding monster. The girlfriend’s head in the fridge. My knife in the mud. Blood all over the place; all over Becki’s shirt.

  “Apparently it can lead to hallucinations, extreme psychotic reaction and unpredictable violence,” recited Charlotte without expression.

  “To say the least,” I said weakly.

  “So you’ve heard of it, then?”

  “Yes.” And I should have suspected something from Becki’s multiple wounds, the frenzy of violence, the absurdly slaughtered goose: her killing had the hallmarks of drug psychosis, and I’d never noticed. Even knowing Hugh’s history, I’d never made the connection.

  “She said PCP is notorious for causing acts of paranoid aggression.”

  “I suppose that’s good for his defence.”

  “I’d rather there was nothing to defend.”

  “No. Sorry.” LSD and angel dust… Christ, Becki, what were you thinking? What were you trying to do to poor Tamara? But maybe you didn’t know what was in that packet. Just a little extra from the dealer...

  Becki, though, was silent, as she would always be.

  “Tamara was worried,” said Charlotte. “She thought he’d taken drugs, from the erratic way he was behaving. Things he said in his sleep. She suggested he should see a doctor, but he got so distressed that... He wasn’t himself. I saw that too. I knew that. But I was distracted by the shop. And I thought...”

  I waited. The sentence never came, but I heard it in my head. She had wondered, had worried, but said nothing; because it couldn’t possibly be Hugh, it couldn’t be her brother.

  “Tamara’s been great,” said Charlotte.

  We drove past the Bollington turnoff, heading for the dull orange glow that signified Manchester. It might as well have been on fire.

  “How’s your shoulder?”

  “It’s all right.”

  “Will you see Karl?”

  “No. I don’t know. I’ll talk to his lawyer. Apparently he knew nothing about the attack at the club. Somebody else arranged it. According to the lawyer.”

  “Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he?” said Charlotte after a while.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you believe him?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “So you’ll see Karl.”

  I swallowed. I did want to see Karl. My little brother, lost in the big prison. I wanted to see if he was all right, which of course he wouldn’t be.

  “What about your mother?”

  “Eventually,” I said. “I’m not going back there yet.” If I went back home, I would have to see Mikey, and feel guilty about him too.

  “Mikey’s been caught shoplifting,” I added, “Karl’s lawyer says.” Mikey would be a hopeless shoplifter. He attracted stares. “He was lucky not to be charged. Only useful thing his statement of special needs has ever done.”

  “You’ll see Mikey,” said Charlotte.

  “Perhaps.”

  “For Christ’s sake, he’s your brother! You’ll see Karl at least.”

  “All right,” I said.

  We were coming up to Poynton now.

  “How will you get back?”

  “Train,” I said. “Frank’ll pick me up at Macc.”

  She didn’t mention the job in the shop. Or the flat in Chorlton. So I didn’t either. The corner of Staffordshire or Derbyshire, or wherever Brocklow was, would do me for now. It wasn’t Scotland, but it was enough.

  “How’s Duncan?”

  “Who? I haven’t seen him for a bit,” she said. “Daddy and Jane are going to need me with them for a while. And Mummy’s coming over from Spain.”

  I almost said, At least they’ve still got you, and decided against it. I thought of Becki’s parents. Grief doesn’t deal in conditionals.

  But if I hadn’t. If I hadn’t.

  If I hadn’t asked Hugh to help me find a job. If I hadn’t weakly stayed instead of heading north. If I hadn’t been let myself be lured by the gleaming kitchen at the club. If I hadn’t been so careless with my knife. If I hadn’t left it lying by the mud pie, all unguarded.

  If I hadn’t got myself stabbed and set Hugh off on his agonised flashback. If I hadn’t shopped Hugh.

  But I hadn’t done that. It only felt as if I had.

  I did not speak to Charlotte any more, since nothing I could say would comfort her. Instead I watched the window, and the raindrops that hurtled at the car like a horde of kamikaze flies, splatting on the glass, desperate to reach its cargo of dead meat.

  About the Author

  Emma Lee Bole is a pseudonym.

  The author lived in Leeds, Liverpool, Sheffield, Nottingham and Manchester before settling in the north-west of England, where she writes children’s books and magazine short stories under other names.

  Despite being married for many years to a scrum-half, she has never once made the teas.