“I know. I’m sorry, it’s just… I think too much, I know. I know.”
“My body is healthy, Ben. Clean. I’m not doing those bad things anymore. That’s my past. I’ve only been with you since then. I don’t even talk to other men nowadays. I’m so very glad of it. Do you remember my friend, Wei Ping?”
“I think so. The young girl who was with you when we first met?” he peered at fresh, raw grazes on the flesh of her knees. They looked like friction burns. Felt his guts twist and knot up. His mind sharpening itself to a knife edge over her words. Examining every sentence and intonation for truth or deceit. Dishonesty. Betrayal.
“Yes, when you came to rescue us, you and the other policemen. When you saved us, Ben. She always liked you so much. But she went back there a couple of weeks later. Started again. It’s not her fault. She knows no other life. She needed the money. For her family.”
“What is it? What happened to her?”
“She went with a man last week and he slashed her face with a straight razor. She’s all stitched up now. He forced himself on her, too. Raped her. She’s very melancholic. It makes me feel so sad. I have been having the worst nightmares. Simply the worst.”
“Why would someone do a thing like that to a woman? Cut them like that?”
“He couldn’t get it up? Drunk? I don’t know. He’s crazy, maybe...”
“Do you know his name?”
“Yes, I do. I mean, I think so. He’s an Italian man. One of the Italians from the North End. His name is Fantino. I think. All of the girls call him Frankie.”
“Call?”
“I’m sorry?”
“You said they call him Frankie.”
“So?”
“So, you used the present tense?”
She giggled, slapped at his shoulder playfully. “Don’t tease me because my English isn’t good. It’s my mother’s fault. A lifetime here in this country and she still refuses to speak the language.”
He felt as though he were freefalling through the pine floorboards into hungry shadows. Vertigo. Head swimming. He dropped his face into his hands a moment trying to focus on solid objects around the room through the gaps in his fingers. The vanity desk, the stool in the corner, the cupboard, the sink, the large gold framed mirror on the wall. Solid things to anchor him back into normalcy. Order. Symmetry. He shoved the echoed tormenting words from his mind, but they came back stronger until he was compelled to speak them as a release valve before spontaneously combusting.
“Have you fucked him, Li Yu? This Fantino man?” he placed his palm to her face, turning her head gently to look her in the irises. His reflection shimmering back at him.
“No, never,” she said, frowning. Turning her gaze away abruptly.
“Are you sure? You can tell me,” he whispered, watching her very carefully. The way her fingers stroked at her throat. Soothing herself. The way her eyes bounced over everything in the room but him.
“I said no, Ben! Why are you always fucking questioning me like I’m some kind of a criminal you’ve arrested? You think I’m just a piece of filth? Some kind of a trashy woman?”
“No! No, of course not. I just want us to be honest with each other. Don’t be upset. It’s good. Fine. Fine.”
“You still don’t trust me? Is that it?”
“No, I believe you. I trust you, of course.” It was his turn to swing eye contact towards something else. To change the subject quickly. “Do you want me to do something about him? This Fantino man?”
“Could you? Would you? For me?” She kissed him hard on the mouth as she spoke.
He answered into her hot, wet lips. “For you, my flower? Anything. She’s your friend and I don’t like to see you upset like this. I’ll find him tomorrow and arrest him. Give him a good working over down the station, if that’s what you want.”
“Arrest him? Is that all you think he deserves?”
“Well, I’m not quite sure what else can be done. I’ll trump up some charges, make it so the piece of shit goes away for a long while.”
“You said you loved me?”
“What? I do! I do, Li Yu. I do. You know I do.”
“Tell me you love me, Ben. Say the words to me.”
“I love you, Li Yu.” A single tear slid from his eye, trickled down into the stubble on his cheek.
“And I love you. Even though I know all the terrible things you’ve done; I still love you. I want you to make it, so he never hurts anyone ever again. He’s a bad man. I hate him. Do you understand me, Ben? I want you to hurt him, hurt him real bad. He’ll kill someone next time. I know it. Do you understand what I’m asking you to do for me? I thought you promised to always protect me?” She kissed him again, pulled the vest from over his head. Running her hands over him, caressing. Began licking his chest and nipples. Working her tongue over his pale skin.
“Yes, I understand. I’ll do it for you. I’ll do anything for you,” he said, closing his eyes.
“Good. Good. Thank you, my kind detective.”
He sighed, “I warned you whoring was no good. You could have caught the syphilis or gotten all sliced up like your friend. You’re my woman now. I’ll look after you, Li. Always protect you.”
“Yes, I know. I’m sorry, too. I’m your woman. I’m sorry.”
“Why are you sorry?” he pushed her away a moment and held her firm. “You’re not deceiving me are you, Li? You’re finished with that life? You promise me?” He snatched looks at her knees again as he asked. Those red wounds on her knees that looked like carpet burns. A mental image of her naked on all fours, splattered with blood, being fucked by the dead man from Seaport tearing through his mind and he blinked and twisted his head away from the thoughts.
“Yes, I promise to you. No men ever really wanted me. They just wanted to use me. Only you’ve ever wanted me. Really wanted me. I was just a dirty half-breed to them then and I’m just a dirty half-breed now.”
He lifted her chin gently, so her eyes were on his again. “Don’t say things like that, it hurts me. I want you. I need you. You’re beautiful to me. Anyhow, something mixed is something stronger.” He kissed the chocolate-colored freckles that star-crossed her cheeks, tasting rouge on his lips. She let out a breath and turned her face away again.
“Like what?”
“I’m not quite sure. Metals… Cocktails…” he smiled.
“I’m none of those,” she crossed her arms.
“Perhaps, you’re a Singapore Sling.” He took her hands in his, pulled her to him again.
“Don’t tease me, Ben. I feel like I am nothing good, sometimes. Nothing.”
“You’re something better than everything. To me,” he said, pushing her down on the bed. Her hair twisting its way in dark waves across the pillows. Kissing her mouth long and hard. Her tongue moving against his. After a while he pulled away from her to inspect the bedsheets and mattress, running his fingertips over the fabrics and cushions, squinting. She sighed heavily but he was too engrossed in his task to notice her resigned impatience.
“Are you going to fuck me already or are you going to just examine the bedsheets for God knows what, Ben?”
He nodded the affirmative a few times and then dragged his eyes away from the bedcovers. She had undressed quickly, seated on the edge of the bed, dark brown naked like something fragile and innocent from a renaissance painting. Waiting for him. He went to her. Her skin clean enough, pure enough to drink from. Tasting her everywhere and then like smoke she engulfed him completely. He fell into her like a baptism of smoke and opium. Moving inside her, their mouths and bodies coming together again and again, he could forget everything. The voices and images in his head faded to a pure white. Pure. And then the boy’s screaming face like a blow to the head with a sledgehammer. Eyes became mouths, agape, shrieking. He kissed Li’s lips harder. Concentrated on her breasts and skin and eyes. Screaming eyes.
He groaned, cursed and pulled himself free from her embrace.
“What’s wrong? Did I
do something wrong?”
“No, it’s not you. I’m sorry. I just have too much on my mind recently, I can’t seem to…”
“I’m sorry.” She pulled the blankets up over her breasts and pouted.
“Please, don’t apologize, Li Yu. It’s not you. There’s a case I’m working on at the moment and it’s disturbed me, is all. A missing kid. Causing me a great deal of stress. It’s not you, I swear.”
“A missing child. But you work Vice, I thought?”
“I do. Never mind. It’s complicated.”
“Will you talk to me about it?”
“I can’t. I don’t think you’d be able to understand it, anyhow. I can’t seem to make sense of it all myself.”
“Let me try and help you forget then.” She pulled him back underneath the covers and they kissed each other slowly, working themselves up together in a strong momentum. Ben could forget.
Only momentarily.
After, he thoroughly scrubbed at himself with the bar of soap he’d brought with him, splashing at his body in the sink in the far corner of the room while she smoked a cigarette, the blanket pulled up to her stomach, sleepily observing the rituals she knew almost as well as he. No longer offended by the routine and more accepting of the man’s madness. He finished with the soap and dropped it out of the window into the alley behind the building with the others from past meetings. A cat screamed and knocked a pile of garbage clattering to the rain-soaked ground. Ben stared out at the night for a moment. A ghost of himself in the evening tinted glass.
Li had slipped out from the blankets and was setting up his pipe as he dried himself off, folded the towel neatly, and set it carefully on the rim of the porcelain. He lay down on the bed again, rolling on his side and taking the stem of the pipe in his mouth as she burnt the opium for him, watching his body unclamp, the muscle definition release and disappear as he inhaled deeply. Her hand pressed to his face.
“You should grow a mustache. It would suit you, I think,” she smiled, running a fingernail playfully underneath his nose.
“No. No, my father had a mustache. I remember he used to wax it up at the ends. He looked like some kind of a sideshow magician.” He held the smoke in his chest and released it slowly through his lips. “I’m not sure if I hated him more than he hated me. He wasn’t a good person. My mother and me had to leave England because of everything he did. My mother changed after that. Or maybe she’d always been that way and I’d never known because I was too frightened by my father. Sometimes, I fear I’m becoming like him… It’s the anniversary of his death this week. Twenty years gone, but I still see him out of the corner of my eye sometimes. Hear him shouting my name. A giant to me then. A giant to me still. Haunting me like a fucking ghost.”
“Breathe. Hush. Sleep, Detective.” She stroked his forehead, running her hands over the dark blond hair that hung damp from his clammy brow.
“Sleep well. Sleep deep. Joyous dreams, Ben.”
His eyes half-closed, gazing at her as a child to a mother, and then he was gone. Lost in the smoke.
Memories of a fractured past.
His past.
The boy’s past.
The water very cool on the boy’s skin and his mother’s eyes held little ghosts of gold from the lamps in the deepest blue of them.
The creeping light of the early hours of morning flowing through the small window and the water making sounds like rain trickling from the roof in a summer storm.
The moist flannel his mother held in her fist passed softly over his flesh, cleansing him. The young child crouched in the tub, gazing at his mother’s face, the way her hair hung down in long twisting blond lines. The way the fabric of the silk nightgown moved over her flesh akin to the water moving over the boy’s.
Turning his eyes to his father’s shaving set stood carefully in its place on the sink, reaching out his hand and running his small fingers over the black and brown hairs of the shaving brush. Badger hair; his mother said. Rough to the touch. He withdrew his hand because the texture of it made him feel strange inside his stomach. Looked away. His view snagging on the razor strop hanging noose-like from a rusty hook. The boy flinched and scrunched his eyes closed. His small hands to his mother’s face, and she closed her eyes and smiled underneath his featherlight fingers. Radiating absolute warmth and absolute beauty, as all mothers to their sons.
“You’re all dirty, Benny. We have to get you all clean now. All clean. All clean and all better. Filth makes sickness, you know? Wash away all the bad now. Wash away all the sickness and all the bad,” she whispered softly.
“Yes, mother,” the small boy said, use to his mother’s repeated worries. Her mantras.
“Did you have another bad dream, Benny? A nightmare? Is that it?”
“Yes, mother.”
“About whom or what was it this time? The Beetle Man nonsense again?
“Yes, mother. But it isn’t nonsense. He’s all black and shiny. He stands at the end of my bed at night. He makes strange clicking and slapping noises and he wants to hurt me. He has these large black eyes that watch me while I’m sleeping, too. I hate him, mother. Hate him.”
“We searched your room together, Benny. There was nothing there, remember?”
“Yes, mother. But…”
“Do you remember the poem I taught you? ‘Antigonish’ by Mr. Mearns?”
“Some of it, mother. It’s a little difficult.”
“‘Yesterday, upon the stair, I met a man who wasn’t there. He wasn’t there again today, oh how I wish he’d go away’. Say it with me, Benny. Repeat it with me. Repeat it until everything is all better. Repetition makes everything better. Drives away the blues.”
The boy chanted the words after his mother. Eyes closed tightly as though reciting a Hail Mary.
“You see Benny, my darling, there’s no Beetle Man. It’s just your imagination playing tricks on you is all. That’s what that poem’s all about. Your imagination playing tricks on you. Everyone’s a little afraid of the dark, of course. They just don’t speak of such things. Even me! Your mother! Can you believe such nonsense? But it’s perfectly normal to worry about things that aren’t real. All right to be lonely at night sometimes. However, you mustn’t let your mind run away from you or you’ll never get it back. You’ll get sick like your uncle George. You don’t want to end up in Bedlam Hospital like him, do you? Now, there is no Beetle Man, is that understood, Benny?”
“Do you promise, mother?”
“Of course, my little darling. I promise you, there’s no Beetle Man and I promise I’ll always protect you,” his mother said smiling, “cross my heart and hope to die, stick a needle in my eye,” her palm pressed to his chest. His heart.
“Now, the next time you feel scared or worried, you repeat that poem over and over until everything is all right with yourself again. Yes?”
“Yes mother.”
“Do you love me, Benny?”
“Yes, mother.”
“Say it, Benny, say the words. Tell me you love me.”
“I love you, mother.”
“There. Now isn’t everything so much better? Do you feel good now, Benny?”
“Yes, mother. But what’s the matter with Uncle George?”
His mother’s face fell into crooked lines. Her eyes began to shine more. The boy watched her bottom lip shake a little. She poured more warm water over his small, pale body. The droplets creating sounds like the piano downstairs that his mother often played after supper.
“He thinks too much, worries too much about things that aren’t real, and it makes him very sick, so he stays in the hospital where the doctors can look after him. Where he can be properly cared for. That’s why you mustn’t worry too much about that silly Beetle Man and other such nonsense. There are more important things to be worried about in the world.”
“Such as what, mother?”
“Well, for instance, sickness and disease. The Spanish Flu. The consumption. Yellow Fever. Typhoid. Lice. That’s w
hy you must stay clean, Benny. The world is a very dirty place. Filthy. A filthy, filthy place.”
“Is that why I’m not allowed to play outside with the other children, mother?”
“Yes, Benny. Lord knows what those scruffy little mites that run around the streets at all hours have. Absolutely filthy. They’re probably crawling with lice for one thing.”
“What are lice, mother?”
“Lice are truly disgusting little insects that live in the hair of dirty people. They suck your blood, like Dracula. Yucky!” she cringed, laughed and tickled her son under his armpits. He giggled and felt his shoulders relax; his stomach untwisting itself.
Then his eyes moved over his mother’s face to the darkness in the hall.
A black figure clambered into the doorway. The boy’s face collapsed. Whimpering. Not the Beetle Man, but the boy’s father, infinitely large and hard, leaning into the bathroom doorframe. His cheeks scratch marked and his face a cloudy red in the lamplight. His thick mustache and the ash hair on his head askew and askance and not right. His sudden appearance frightened the boy, and he tried to make himself smaller in the bath. The father was wearing dark grey one-piece underwear and the boy didn’t like the stains on it. Their existence made him feel irritable and uncomfortable. As though his tummy were drying out. Glancing at the shapes of them, it felt as though he was standing on the ledge of a tall building looking down. Vertigo, that feeling was called, his mother had said. He wanted to cry out. Making himself as compact as he possibly could within the confines of the white porcelain and willing his father to leave. Just leave. Just go. Father’s presence never ended well for the boy. Or for his mother.
“What the bloody hell is going on here then? Who’s singing and what the hell are you doing with the boy again?” the father shouted, unreasonably loud into the silence of the house. An unreasonable man in unreasonable times and the boy felt a cold, sharp certainty he would become his father as all boys become their fathers in the end. Rage, violence and sickness passed down generation to generation as though it were the color of the eyes or the tint of the hair.
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