That Night

by Gillian McAllister

  ‘Joe,’ Frannie shouted. ‘Honestly – don’t.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Go off on one.’

  ‘It’s not going off on one to punch someone for smoking on my nephew,’ Joe said. ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Don’t,’ Frannie said, reaching for him and tugging at his arm. He threw her off, spun around, looking for the man, then shouted, ‘Come on, then!’

  A passing policeman stopped, looking at them. ‘Everything okay here?’ he said.

  He stood in the shadow of a doorway to a bank, wearing an all-black uniform. Red stripes down the sides of his trousers. She’d seen them around. His brown eyes caught the sunlight, turning them a strange bronze. His bottom half was still in shadow, almost invisible in the gloom.

  ‘Yeah,’ Cathy said hesitantly. ‘No – it’s fine. Thank you.’ Her cheeks burned under his scrutiny. ‘Sorry. My brother’s just – you know. Just …’ Her voice trailed off; she was unable to finish that sentence. How could she? My brother is just occasionally violent?

  ‘Well – apart from people smoking. He’s gone now,’ Joe said.

  The policeman inclined his head slightly, looking at Joe. ‘Who?’

  ‘This total twat who blew smoke over my sister.’

  ‘He was a twat,’ Frannie said with a laugh.

  The policeman said nothing for a few seconds, looking into the distance, then back at Frannie. ‘For sure, it is best not to cause any trouble while you’re here,’ he said softly. He had heavy-lidded eyes, cheekbones so defined it looked like somebody had taken out two great round scoops from beneath them. ‘No shouting in the streets.’

  ‘He smoked over my fucking baby,’ Frannie said, uncharacteristically coarse. Cathy found the development of Frannie’s maternal instinct fascinating. Previously passive, she became occasionally fierce. It presented itself in myriad ways, Cathy remembers; in the early days, Frannie was smilingly unable to concentrate on anything but Paul, her gaze constantly trained on him, laughing off nights of no sleep. That’s love, Cathy assumes.

  ‘It is not nice for a young woman like you to harass men,’ the policeman said. ‘Or to swear at people when I only try … to help.’ He puffed air out of the side of his mouth, a small, contemptuous laugh that seemed, to Cathy, to say: you have no idea how powerful I am.

  That was the catalyst. The first domino. The innocuous, stupid market altercation that led them to where they are now.

  Cathy stares down at her handbag, which sits at her feet on the grey floor of the empty bus. Afterwards, she is going to Juliet’s Balcony. She comes each time they visit. She wanted to go, was saving it, but now she’s got to go to cover up what she’s really doing here. Covering up cover-ups.

  She leans her head against the window as the bus pulls up near the old amphitheatre. As she steps off the bus, the sun runs warmth up her body, starting as her legs hit the sun, and moving upwards.

  She thought she’d prefer some time by herself, but it feels like her heart is straining in her chest. She keeps thinking of William. His parents. A girlfriend? A child? The wallet seems to weigh down her bag more heavily than before.

  Verona looks just the same as earlier in the week. Tourists out in the sun in the little alleyways, half in shade, half in light, drinking coffee, laughing, shading their eyes against the glare. Cathy walks into the main square, past the amphitheatre. She looks down one of the tunnels leading to the centre, sees blood-red carpets. All that history. Those sacrifices. Performances. Power. She turns away from it. She can’t bear it.

  She needs a newsagent off the main thoroughfare. She walks up Via Carlo Cattaneo. Grey stone beneath her, azure above. Cathy is a dot in the universe.

  She blinks slowly. They’re going to try to make William’s family – whoever they are – believe he is alive. She catches her reflection in a window. Shorts, a t-shirt. Sunglasses. She looks like a normal woman, but she is a monster. Must be. Is her own family worth so much more to her than another’s? And why?

  Pastel-coloured buildings crowd in. She feels like she’s on a boat, like the floor is moving underneath her. She stops for a moment by a window with bars across it, like a cell, but then she has to keep moving again. Keep moving forward. Cover it up. Think about it after. Put as much distance between yourself and the crime. Deny, deny, deny, and Cathy is excellent at denying herself things. It’s not such a stretch to deny that something happened too.

  She walks past two mini piazzas, a posh bakery and a restaurant with Italian flags up outside it that flap in the wind, a row of Vespas.

  She looks around her. CCTV is everywhere. Little round cameras, rectangular ones pointing down like birds homing in on their prey. She can’t do it here. She needs a crowd. The second she uses his card, they will comb the CCTV.

  She needs something as everyday as possible. Trying to look casual, she gets out her phone, then navigates across the city to Juliet’s Balcony. She passes clean, bright, white piazzas with neat green topiary, polished marble floors, little alleyways, Italian chalkboards advertising things Cathy can’t understand outside cafés. Shit, shit, shit. Where are the newsagents? Just as she starts to think she won’t find any, she sees one. A green awning with white trim. More than a handful of people inside and out. She could blend in. She looks up, trying to look normal. No CCTV that she can see. This is it. This is their chance.

  Inside, the shop is warm and dark. It smells of newspapers and sun-cream. Cathy edges behind somebody to get a bottle of water. Her entire body is covered in sweat, which evaporates off her as she opens the fridge, leaving her shivery. Her damp fingers leave impressions in the condensation on the bottle of Evian. Fingerprints. She stares at them. Her hands slip on the cold bottle. It’s almost icy, a solid weight in her hands.

  Just get to the till, she tells herself, walking mechanically forward.

  She reaches into her handbag to touch William’s wallet.

  Anybody could see her here on the CCTV. Anybody could ask her, at the till, why she is using a card clearly not belonging to her. They could be old-fashioned, and ask for a signature. And then what? No. This is stupid. The skin on her chest heats up, becomes mottled.

  She can’t do it.

  She won’t do it. Cathy can’t disentangle the fear from morality and logic. It is all a mess in her mind.

  She pays for the water with her own card and gets out, breathing heavily, her hands two spikes of pins and needles.

  She calls Joe.

  ‘How’d it go?’ he says, instead of greeting her.

  ‘I couldn’t do it, Joe,’ she says softly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I just couldn’t do it.’ She uncaps the water and sips from it, from this bottle that was supposed to – on some other immoral planet – have been purchased by a dead man.

  Joe hesitates. ‘You’re too scared?’ he asks. She casts about inside herself, wondering if it is fear, and maybe it is, partly. But she can’t use a dead man’s card, can’t pretend to be him. Lead his family to false hope. She can’t, she can’t. She knows that makes no sense, given what they’re trying to get away with. That, in refusing to proceed down the slippery slope, Cathy is refusing to help her sister. Her sister who is relying on her, who has always relied on her, whose hand Cathy held tightly as they crossed the busy road outside their school. And what is she doing now? Letting go. Casting her into the traffic. There is guilt whichever action she takes.

  Her throat clogs with tears. She never cries. She stops them before they begin, and speaks clearly to Joe.

  ‘I just – I feel like a criminal. It felt too risky.’

  ‘Just come home,’ he says, his voice neutral, a tone she can’t read. ‘Back to the villa. Okay?’ he adds.

  ‘Okay,’ she says.

  She decides to go to Juliet’s Balcony before leaving. She needs to, to pretend that this is why she went into Verona in the first place. It’s free to go and see the Balcony, if you don’t mind the crowds. She runs a hand along the graffitied wall, covered in
padlocks made by hundreds of lovers before her. She wishes she had somebody to tell about all this, somebody to confide in who isn’t a family member, wishes too that she weren’t a failure, evidently unable to grasp the most simple of intimacies. Finally, she reaches the Balcony. She gazes up at it, the small, cream-coloured box covered in ivy, and she thinks of the Capulets and the Montagues. All the sacrifices people before her have made for love. For their partners, for their lovers, for their families.

  Part II

  * * *

  CRIMINAL DAMAGE

  16.

  Joe

  Joe slides the gearstick into neutral unnaturally, using his right hand, as he approaches the hire-car place. Vans line the forecourt, reflecting bright shards of light that stay in his vision when he closes his eyes. He’s signalling right. He’s already done one loop, hoping nobody would notice. And now he’s ready. He’s worked out his target, and he’s ready.

  He passes through their entrance barrier, then lines the car up and presses down on the accelerator. The car propels forwards into a curved line of crash barriers, a satisfying scraping noise. He keeps going, driving the crash barriers into the car, embedding them completely. Then silence. Joe cannot help but think of Frannie and of William. Is this how it sounded? How it felt? How did it feel to be alone in the quiet, in the afterwards?

  Joe waits for a few seconds, then gets out, looking mystified. Hopefully. Hopefully. Hopefully it will have dented the same spot. The sun heats the back of his neck as he leans down to look at it, as intense as a hot blade on his skin. Suddenly, in the warmth, he thinks of Lydia, smiling Lydia. who, last January said, ‘Let’s go to the beach for the day,’ and they did. He will remember that day forever. Fish and chips from a shared polystyrene dish, wooden forks, hot salty breaths mingling into the cold foggy air. The sea disappearing in the early sunset, into the darkness. Not caring about the chill in their bones. Flasks of tea on the way home. She’d spilt hers everywhere, and he’d said, ‘There’s pissing hot tea on my thighs!’ while trying to join the motorway slip-road. She has expanded their lives so much, and now he has risked that, their big, expansive life together, for this.

  He inspects the car now. Yes. He’s got it. He’s covered up the dent, subsumed into a second accident, one with witnesses.

  An Italian man comes out of the office, on to the pavement, right up to the barrier Joe hit. A frown crosses his face as he looks at Joe and the hire car. Joe steps into role. ‘Sorry,’ he says, moving towards the man. ‘So sorry. I didn’t see the barrier.’

  ‘Oh,’ the man says, a hand going to his dark hair. ‘Right, it is okay.’

  ‘I guess there’ll be an excess,’ Joe says.

  ‘Yes – is scraped quite badly, no?’ the man says, his eyes meeting Joe’s. He flashes a smile. ‘Oops, as you Brits would say.’

  ‘But good for you,’ Joe would usually have said back faux-cheerfully. But he must play ball today. ‘Sorry,’ he says sincerely. He’s surprised to find his voice imbued with feeling. He doesn’t want to be here, crashing cars and telling lies. And so it is easy to apologize genuinely. There is just something else he is apologizing for, is all. ‘So, so sorry,’ Joe says, his voice hoarse with it, with how sorry he is.

  The car is taken to the side of the lot and Joe is left on the pavement in the sun. He seeks out a bench in the shade and wipes his forehead against the shoulder of his t-shirt. At least he can look stressed. Everyone will just think he is worried about the car.

  He watches a woman inspect it. She is dressed in a full suit with a scarf around her neck, like an air stewardess. She must be so hot, but there isn’t a single droplet of sweat on her that Joe can see. Her hair is perfectly neat.

  Joe sits, watching the woman, wondering where the minuscule droplets of blood are on the car that Frannie’s definitely missed. When the police will come knocking. What his sister will say to the authorities, to a court. How she will sit that first night in the cell, all angular arms and legs, curled up alone.

  He puts his sunglasses on so nobody can read his expression. The breeze smells hot and verdant, the dog days of July. He wonders if summers will always remind him of this, or if he will ever forget, if he will ever move on. He wonders when they will next come back to the villa. He wonders how they will ever sell it, knowing what lies beneath the land nearby.

  The man pops out of the office, from behind Joe, making him jump.

  ‘You are to sign here,’ he says, passing him a sheet of Italian text with a pencil cross next to a signature box. He has smoker’s fingers, stained sodium-yellow. Joe signs it without thinking, craving a cigarette. Whatever is written there in those T&Cs can’t be as bad as what he is covering up. He passes back the pen, curling his dirty nails into his palms unnaturally, defensively.

  After he’s signed, the woman with the scarf arrives.

  ‘Grazie,’ Joe says deliberately.

  ‘Prego,’ the man murmurs immediately.

  ‘I’ll go now?’ Joe stands up, hoping the finality of the gesture will cut through any more admin. He can’t take it. His chest is aching with the effort of keeping everything inside, of managing everything.

  This feeling is no stranger to Joe. Only recently, in May, he worked eighty hours in a week, not able to leave a retired – but not old – greyhound called Lucie, who had had extensive surgery. He did everything – the operations, the drug administrations, the aftercare. Double, triple shifts. Needlessly: he trusts the veterinary nurses. He trusts Evan, who was working on her with him. But he wasn’t able to leave, spent any breaks he took applying nicotine patches and keeping watch through the windows. ‘I won’t relax at home anyway,’ he’d said to anybody who would listen. And that is the truth, but, as in most things, there are multiple truths: Joe was also too anxious, too afraid of losing control, to leave. It was only when he had had a panic attack and Frannie sent him away with wine that he finally was able to relax, fell asleep on her sofa to the sound of her saying, ‘I find being generally useless makes for a much happier life.’ He’d drifted off, laughing softly.

  ‘Wait, wait, wait,’ the man says, an arm outstretched. Joe’s heart pumps lightning around his body. ‘We have to see the car is okay – yes? Other than your accident, for which you have agreed to pay this.’ He taps the sheet.

  The woman and the man leave to look at the car. He thought they’d already done that. He watches them from behind his sunglasses, observing their body language, their faces, as they approach the front bumper. How does she walk in those heels all day?

  ‘This is yours?’ the woman says, coming around with something burgundy in her hands. Joe’s entire body jolts. But it’s just Frannie’s purse.

  He stares at the bag in the woman’s outstretched hand. It’s fine. It’s fine. That’s not evidence. He was so busy fixing the outside of the car, he forgot to look inside. What else has he missed? Her eyebrows rise. He takes off his sunglasses. The pale pavement is blinding.

  He hands over the keys, and the woman takes them. She stumbles slightly in her heels as she does so, a tiny chink in her perfect armour. ‘Might want to try flats,’ Joe says drily.

  ‘Not allowed,’ the woman says with a smile.

  ‘Get him in heels too, then,’ Joe says, raising his eyebrows in the direction of the man.

  The woman laughs and turns away from him. The car is being taken away. He’s done it. It’ll be cleaned now, thoroughly, professionally, any microscopic evidence that remains wiped away.

  Joe’s body sags in relief as he dials the taxi number handwritten on a sign in the window. He presses call and feels a tap on his shoulder. ‘Sorry – you miss one signature,’ the woman says. Joe looks closely at her and sees three distinct beads of sweat along her upper lip. He feels sorry for her, suddenly, in that suit in this weather, like she is an overworked animal, a donkey on Blackpool beach.

  Joe’s always been this way. Sympathetic to all animals and only some people. He took in a stray cat when he was nine, a ginger tom that s
neaked in through his bedroom window, his hips so bony, his fur matted. He fed it leftovers for a week before he told his parents. His mother wanted to put up a sign at the vets’, but Joe wouldn’t let her. He kept the cat, named it Peanut. He slept on Joe’s pillow every night for a decade, his first pet. He looked at him one night, his spotty stomach more rounded, his fur glossy, and thought, I want to be a vet. Not because of his mother, but because of that little Peanut that slept in his bed.

  ‘We need your consent to tow it away,’ the Blackpool donkey says. She gestures down the road. A red tow truck is coming. Joe’s shoulders drop. ‘Not safe at all to drive,’ she adds with a smile. He keeps watching. Behind the tow truck is a police car. He squints at the horizon, trying not to look guilty.

  ‘There’s nothing else?’ he says.

  The woman nods and he leans into the hot car, checking, checking again, but it’s empty. He’s just paranoid.

  The woman taps the paper when he comes back. He signs his name again, this time with a shakier hand than before. He looks at the two signatures, patchy blue biro, side by side, panic inscribed within them, then pulls his gaze back to the police, who have pulled up outside the building. They’re sitting in the car now, two dark-haired men, just watching the world. And watching him.

  Joe heads back to the villa to retrieve the wallet from Cathy. Another thing to sort. He doesn’t mind the sorting. Like Lucie the greyhound, he doesn’t trust anybody else to do it. He’s the head of this family now, really. It’s up to him.

  ‘I can’t believe you crashed the car,’ she says to him. They’re in her room.

  He laughs softly, a dark little laugh. ‘What a great metaphor a car crash is,’ he says, and Cathy smiles wanly.

  ‘Now I need to do what you were supposed to,’ he says, but he says it mildly. He can understand why she didn’t use William’s card. She places the wallet into his outstretched palm. Something about it reminds him of their childhood. Some transaction that once took place. A pact, a secret, the details of which are lost to the past.