Irene drew her handbag closer to her chest. “I’d like to give the book to Carla myself, if you don’t mind,” she said, her tightly prim tone disguising the fact that she was afraid now, of this large man towering over her, afraid of what he might do if he saw what Daniel had drawn.
“I do mind,” Theo snapped. “Give me the book,” he said, his hand held out in front of her face, “and I’ll call you a taxi.”
Irene pressed her lips together firmly, shaking her head. “I’m asking you not to read it, I don’t—”
“Carla can look at it, but I can’t?” he asked. “Why—”
“I’m certain Carla has already seen it,” Irene explained. “It wouldn’t come as a shock to her.”
“A shock?” His hands dropped to his sides. “Why would it be shocking to me?” He raised his eyes to the ceiling once more. “Oh, for God’s sake. It’s about Carla, isn’t it? Are there pictures of Carla in it? He was fixated on her, you know, in an unhealthy way. He was quite a disturbed young man, I’m afraid.” Irene said nothing, only looked down at the bag in her lap. “Is it not that?” Myerson asked. “Is it something about me? He has a pop at me, does he?”
“The thing is—” Irene started to speak but she was silenced by a sudden act of violence as Theo’s hand shot out, as roughly he grabbed her handbag from her lap. “No!” she cried. “Wait, please.”
“I’ve had about enough of this,” Theo snarled, snatching the book from the bag, which he then discarded, tossing it back toward her. It fell to the floor, spilling her possessions, her spare spectacles and her powder compact, her little tweed change purse, onto the carpet.
Taking great care, Irene knelt down to gather her things while above her, Myerson towered. Ignoring Irene, he opened the book and began to read. “The Origins of Ares!” he smirked. “God, he thought a lot of himself, didn’t he? Ares, god of war! That little shit. . . .” His eyes skimmed the pages as he flicked quickly through the book until abruptly, and with an audible intake of breath, he stopped. The curl of his lip disappeared and his skin seemed to whiten before Irene’s eyes; his fingers began to curl into fists, crumpling the pages of the notebook as they did.
“Mr. Myerson,” Irene said, her heart sinking in her chest, “you shouldn’t be looking at it.” She pulled herself slowly to her feet. “You don’t want to see what he drew,” she said, although she could tell by the horrified expression on Theo’s face that it was too late. “It’s terribly upsetting, I know, I . . .”
Suddenly, Irene’s head was swimming, the carpet beneath her feet seeming to tilt and rock like a boat, the wood burner, the beautiful oak shelves blurring before her. “Oh . . . I don’t feel very well,” she said, and she reached out her hand to where she expected the chair to be, but found that it wasn’t. She stumbled, righted herself, squeezing her eyes tightly shut and then opening them again. It was the sherry, the sherry and the heat from the fire, she felt quite odd, and there was Myerson, staring at her, his mouth red and open and his face darkening and his hands clenched to fists, oh God. She took a step backward, reaching for something to hold on to and finding nothing, what a fool she’d been, to bring the notebook with her! She thought she was being brave coming here, but she’d been a fool, an old fool, just as people thought she was.
THIRTY-TWO
Theo had killed with the stroke of a pen many times. Over the course of a few thousand pages of fiction, he had stabbed, shot, and eviscerated people, he had hanged them from makeshift gallows, he had battered them to death with a sharp rock held in the palm of a small hand. And he had contemplated worse (oh, the things he had considered!) as he wondered what we (he, anyone) might be capable of in extremis.
The notebook was gone, fed to the fire. The old woman was back on her feet but flustered and frightened; she’d not expected him to react so quickly, as strongly as he had. As he watched her, it occurred to him how little it would take: they were so fragile at that age, and she was already unsteady on her feet; she’d drunk that glass of sherry very fast. Now she swayed a little in front of him, her eyes full of tears. She stood on the edge of a rug whose corner had ruched up when she’d been scrabbling around on the floor, almost exactly midway between the sharp-cornered stone hearth and his clean-lined coffee table in glass and bronze.
Were he writing this scene, he’d be spoiled for choice.
The One Who Got Away
He can’t see anything except for red.
When he woke that morning he didn’t think he’d be the hero of the story. If he’d thought about it at all, he might have called himself the hunter.
When he woke that morning, he couldn’t imagine how it would be, how she would be, different than what he wanted, not the one he wanted at all. He couldn’t imagine how she’d lie and trick him.
When he woke that morning, he never thought he’d be the prey.
The unfairness of it, bitter in his mouth, trickles down the back of his throat as he succumbs to her, the one who got away, the girl with the ugly face, red-handed, rock-handed, vengeful. She’s all he can see, the last thing he’ll see.
The One Who Got Away
She knows, before she sees, that he has found her. She knows, before she sees, that it will be his face behind the wheel. She freezes. For a second she hesitates, and then she leaves the road, takes off running, into a ditch, over a wooden fence. She scrambles into the adjacent field and runs blind, falling, picking herself up, making no sound. What good would screaming do?
When he catches her, he takes handfuls of her hair, pulls her down. She can smell his breath. She knows what he is going to do to her. She knows what is coming because she has already seen him do it, she saw him do it to her friend, how savagely he pushed her face into the dirt, how he pawed at her.
She saw how hard her friend fought.
She saw how she lost.
So she doesn’t fight, she goes limp. She lies there in the dirt, a dead weight. While weakly he paws at her clothes, she keeps her eyes on his face all the time.
This is not what he wants.
Close your eyes, he tells her. Close your eyes.
She will not close her eyes.
He slaps her across the face. She does not react; she makes no sound. Her pale limbs are heavy, so heavy in the dirt, she is sinking into it. She is taking him with her.
This is not what he wants.
He climbs off her body, beats the earth with his fist. He has blood on his face and in his mouth. He is limp, beaten.
This is not what he wants.
He starts to cry.
While he is crying, she picks herself silently up off the ground.
Go, he says to her. Just go. Just run.
But this girl doesn’t want to run; she has done her running. She picks up a stone, jagged-edged, its tip pointed like an arrowhead. Nothing too big, just large enough to fit snugly into the palm of her hand.
Her hand cups the warm stone and his eyes widen in surprise as she swings her arm toward him. At the sound of the bone at his temple splitting, joy fizzes up in her and she swings a second time, and again, and again, until she is drenched in sweat and in his blood. She thinks she might have heard him begging her to stop, but she cannot be sure; she might just as well have imagined it.
When the police come, the girl will tell them how she fought for her life and they will believe her.
THIRTY-THREE
Miriam sifted through her keepsakes, the objects she’d gathered during the course of brushes with other lives—the lives of others, other lives she might have lived. She noted with some sadness how they were depleted: the key she had taken from the boat was gone, as well as one of Lorraine’s earrings, which pained her terribly.
The things she chose to hold on to represented important moments for her, and when she thought about those times—those few moments alone with Daniel on the boat, her escape from
the farmhouse—she liked to have associated objects to hold, to help bring her back to how it really was, to how she really felt. Now, as she held the little silver cross that her father had given her for her confirmation, her first Communion, she closed her eyes tightly and imagined herself at fourteen, before the horrors of the farmhouse, when she was still an innocent.
Miriam was aware that this habit, of collecting trinkets to transport her back to important moments, was a trait she shared with psychopaths and serial killers, which was something that bothered her, but the truth, Miriam believed, was that we all have our monstrous moments, and these objects helped her stay true to who she really was, to the monster she had made of herself.
Sometimes, when she found herself in a very dark place, she felt overwhelmed by the urge to confess. If she had a confessor, where would she start? Would it be with the most recent transgression or the very first one? It had to be the latter, she supposed. The first was the defining one, the one that set her on this path.
* * *
Start with the night she escaped from the farmhouse, when she stood in front of the broken window and prayed, and prayed. When she clambered out the window, when she ran along the dirt road. When she heard the thunder that wasn’t thunder, the sound of the car, coming from behind her, coming from the farm. When she realized he was coming for her and started to run again, scrambling over a fence, flinging herself into a ditch, wriggling forward on her stomach until she was concealed, at least in part, by an overhanging tree. There she lay, listening to the car’s gears grinding as it slowed, its lights illuminating the branch above her head. The car passed.
For a while after that, she lay in the ditch. How long, she couldn’t say. She could never say. Miriam remembered so much detail about that day and the night that followed—the smell of the house, the pale, blasted blue of the evening sky, the song in the car, and that sound Lorraine made, that awful sound, after he punched her. But she could not for the life of her remember how long she had lain in that ditch, frozen and unable to move, only her mind whirring, thinking, It’s not my fault he chose you.
She could not remember, either, how long she stood in the locked room in the farmhouse, paralyzed with terror in front of the broken window, could not remember how long it had taken her to make the decision that her best chance was not to stay and fight but to run, to raise the alarm. She could not remember how long she stood there and prayed, prayed that he wouldn’t come down the stairs, prayed that he wouldn’t come for her. Prayed that he would take his time with Lorraine.
Her mind moved on, and it wasn’t until she sat in Lorraine’s bedroom at her dressing table, pocketing her gold earrings, considering what a bad person she was, that they returned to her, those despicable things she had thought, all the time she had wasted while she was thinking them.
Miriam was tested and found wanting; she discovered at that time that she lacked some essential goodness, some critical strand of moral fiber.
She was not good then, and has not been good since.
* * *
At the bottom of the wooden box, beneath the letter from the lawyer, lay the dog ID tag.
Miriam didn’t like to think about that moment, the moment with the dog. It wasn’t something she was proud of; it was a loss of control, in a moment of pain. She kept the tag as a reminder to herself, that the transfer of hatred from one person to another didn’t work. Didn’t make sense. She thought about Jeremy, how she longed to push a knife into his throat. Sometimes she thought about Myerson too, about smacking him over the back of the head with a claw hammer, pushing him into the canal, watching him sink beneath the surface of that filthy water.
She thought about it, but she didn’t have the courage to act. And then it happened, one day, that there was a rude customer in the shop, and a near-collision on the towpath with a cyclist who called her a stupid fat bitch, and, arriving home with her chest tight and her vision blurred, in the early stages of a full-blown panic attack, she found the dog on her back deck, tearing into the food recycling bag she’d put out that morning and forgotten to take to the bins, and almost without thinking, she snatched the dog up. She took it down to her cabin, placed it in the sink, and quickly, with a sharp knife, cut its throat.
The animal didn’t suffer; it was a clean kill. Not literally, of course—literally it made a terrible mess, blood all over her hands and her clothes and the floor, so much more than you would have thought; it took an age to clear it all up. Sometimes, she thought she could still smell it.
Later that night, she put the dog in a bag and carried it along the path, tipped it out of the bag into the water at the back of Theo’s house. She thought the little body might be found, but it must have drifted into the tunnel, perhaps snagged on the propeller of someone’s boat, so in the end, Theo never got to wonder about who had done such a terrible thing, he just got to wonder where the dog was, and in some ways Miriam found that more satisfying, the sight of him wandering up and down the path and in the roads nearby, calling the animal’s name, putting up pitiful little posters.
* * *
Miriam slipped the dog tag into her pocket and headed out, walking west toward Myerson’s house. If she were to confess anything, it would be to that, the shameful incident with the dog, and if she were to confess it to anyone, then surely it should be to Myerson. He might report her to the police, of course, but something told her he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t want to admit to them how this thing had started. He wouldn’t want to go into detail; it would hurt his pride.
She had convinced herself of all this, reassured herself, certain now that telling him about the dog would be the right thing to do for her—it would have the twin benefits of punishing Myerson while at the same time easing her burden. So, fists determinedly clenched at her side, jaw set firm, she marched up to the steps from the towpath and around the corner to Noel Road, where she came to an abrupt halt.
There he was, at the top of the steps outside his front door, looking furtively this way and that, scanning the pavements anxiously, his eyes meeting hers and widening in sudden astonishment before, flanked by two uniformed police officers, he began to make his way down the steps and into a waiting car.
Off they went. Miriam, her heart beating fit to burst, could scarcely believe her eyes. Had she won? Had some justice been done, at last?
She stood there, so astounded for a moment by what she had witnessed that she almost forgot to feel elated, but then that moment passed, and she felt her confusion giving way to happiness, a smile spreading over her face, and she raised both hands to her mouth and started to laugh. She laughed and laughed, a strange sound even to her own ears.
When she recovered, she noticed that someone was watching her, a man across the street, a little farther down the road. An older man, in a wheelchair, with a shock of white hair on his head. Then he wheeled himself down off the pavement and looked up and down the road as though he were about to cross; Miriam thought for a moment that he was going to come over and talk to her, but a car pulled up, one of those large taxis, and the driver got out and helped the man into the back of the car. The taxi swung out into the road, performing a wide U-turn.
As the car drove past, Miriam’s eyes met those of the man in the car, and all the hair stood up on the back of her neck.
THIRTY-FOUR
Everything is material. And comedy equals tragedy plus time. Isn’t that how it goes? Sitting in a stuffy room faced by two detectives, Theo wondered bitterly just how much time would need to pass before what had happened to him—the death of his child, the subsequent disintegration of his marriage—would become funny. It had been fifteen years since his son died, after all—shouldn’t it be just a little bit funny by now?
Bullshit.
As for everything being material, he was finding it hard to make mental notes of his surroundings, all of his observations turning out to be banal: the room was gray, boxy, it smelled like an offi
ce—bad coffee, new furniture. The only sound he could hear was an insidious white-noise hum overlaid with the rather nasal breathing of Detective Chalmers opposite.
In front of him, on the table between him, Chalmers, and Detective Barker, was a knife in a plastic bag. A small knife, with a black wooden handle and a dark substance staining the blade. A small chef’s knife. His small chef’s knife, not lost in the chaos of the cutlery drawer after all.
When they placed the knife on the table in front of him, Theo’s heart sank with the realization that this was not going to be material. This wasn’t going to be a funny story he told later on. It was going to be a very, very long time indeed before this became comedy.
“Do you recognize this, Mr. Myerson?” Detective Chalmers asked him. Theo peered at the knife. Many thoughts came into his head, all of them stupid. He heard himself making a small hmmm noise, which was also stupid. No one looked at an object and said, hmmm. They said yes, I recognize that or no, I don’t recognize that, but in this case, the latter course of action was not open to him, because he was well aware that if the police were presenting this knife to him at this moment, they must know he recognized it.
Think fast think fast think fast, Theo thought, which was irritating, because it stopped him from thinking anything other than the word fast. Think something other than fast, for God’s sake.
The knife was his, and they knew it—they had not connected it to him by accident. So, that was that, wasn’t it? This, Theo thought, is the end. The end of the world as he knew it. And as the song goes, he felt fine. The odd thing was, he actually did feel fine. Well, perhaps fine was a stretch, but he didn’t feel as bad as he’d expected to feel. Perhaps it was true, what they say—whoever they are—that it’s the hope that kills you. Now that there was no longer any hope, he felt better. Something to do with suspense, he supposed. Suspense is the agonizing thing, isn’t it? Hitchcock knew that. Now the suspense was over, now he knew what was going to happen, he felt shocked and sad, but he also felt relieved.
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