No Harm Can Come to a Good Man

by James Smythe

  ‘No,’ Amit says, ‘you think it’s a good idea.’

  Laurence takes Deanna’s hand. ‘It can’t hurt.’

  ‘Of course it can,’ she says.

  ‘I can’t be done,’ Laurence tells her.

  ‘Why not? Why can’t you be done?’ She laughs to herself, at how ridiculous this all is, the thing that he’s put first, ever since Sean died. ‘Just do what you want, Laurence. You save this, if it’s that important to you.’ She goes to the kitchen and tells Alyx to go upstairs and wake her sister. ‘I need to watch something on the television,’ she says. She switches to Channel 5, to the live news feed, as she hears the roar of the reporters outside the front of the house, and they cut to their live feed. She turns the volume back on, so quiet that she can barely hear it, so she stands right up close to the set. She wants to know what he can possibly say to make this better now.

  ‘We go now to Sandra Leppets, outside the Walker residence.’ Deanna watches this woman appear on her screen, blonde hair and a tan that’s far beyond natural. Behind her, Deanna sees their front door opening, and then he’s there, and he clears his throat. Nothing about this is prepared; this is simply a man who would have been king, wearing a five hundred dollar white shirt that doesn’t fit any more. He has polished himself as best he can, but he still looks ruined, Deanna thinks. For a second, she forgives him for everything; for a second, she feels sorry for him.

  ‘I won’t keep you long,’ Laurence says to the assembled cameras. He’s got an easy charisma when he talks politics, one that’s far subtler when he’s in family mode. When he’s working, he almost makes it seem effortless. Deanna thinks that holding in how he’s feeling now is wrong. Now, maybe, he should be focused on being more human, less politician. ‘You’ve all seen the video of something that hasn’t happened, and is not going to happen. It cannot and will not be true. This is mechanical error; it’s the result of a computer going wrong. We’ve all had that, and we all know what a pain in the ass it can be. Imagine what this feels like. There’s no trying to turn it off and on again.’ He goes for a laugh, and doesn’t get one. ‘I can’t explain it, because I’m not a man who knows about technology.’ Earthy, homely language. ‘I’m just like you.’ He’s electioneering, Deanna thinks. Refusing to accept that he’s out of the race; instead, he’s still clinging on, or clawing back. ‘Ever since I lost my son,’ he says, and that makes Deanna feel sick. Using that, here and now.

  She shuts off the television and opens the back door to the house. Standing in the garden, she can feel the cold of the morning on her face, and she breathes in as deeply as she can. She doesn’t want to hate him for this. That would be the worst thing that could happen.

  Lane finally gets up and showers and dresses and she comes downstairs and tells her parents – sitting with Amit in the living room, watching her father on the television from earlier in the day – that she’s going out.

  ‘You can’t,’ Deanna says. ‘You really should stay here today, Laney.’

  ‘I’m meeting my friends,’ Lane says. ‘I won’t be late.’ She doesn’t wait for the conversation to go any further; she turns and opens the front door, and she’s out. She knows that Deanna won’t follow her out to the cameras, because she won’t want to make a scene in front of them, so they’re almost a barrier of protection; a way of her getting exactly what she wants. The reporters all stand up as she comes out, clearly not expecting action again so fast, and they try to ask her questions. They ask her about her father. They ask why this happened; if he’s done anything untoward; given any indication that he’s not the man that he says he is; if he’s ever hurt any of them before. One of them asks if he’s ever tried to abuse her, the question hard and direct, come from nowhere. She doesn’t see who asked it.

  ‘Screw you,’ she says, and she gives them the finger, some young punk gesture that makes her feel almost empowered. She starts to run down the street, and she carries on until she gets to the bus stop. While she catches her breath and waits for it to come she watches the end of the road to see if the reporters and cameras have followed her. But there’s nothing, only a couple of cars on the street, some rubberneckers gawping at her – not because they recognize her, but because of how she looks. The bus comes, right on schedule, and she swipes her card and sits at the back, and she watches the television screens embedded into the plastic lining of the walls, the pundits talking about her family. They show the ClearVista video again, here in public. Everybody on the bus has seen it already, but what’s another view? Some women a few rows ahead of Lane talk about how terrible it is, and how they totally misjudged Laurence Walker. He seemed – past tense – like such a nice man. Now, evidently, he’s not. This is all, to them, a foregone conclusion.

  When the bus arrives at the mall, Lane pushes her way off, through the people dawdling and taking their time. She doesn’t want to be recognized, and she pulls the hood of her sweatshirt over her head. She goes in through the big doors, and she smells the fountains and the bakeries that sit near the entrance, and she looks to see if there’s anybody she knows so that she can avoid them. Her friends all called her before her mother had their numbers wiped out, but she cancelled every single call. Even William tried to phone: William, whom she’s been having sex with, not because she even really likes him but because it’s something to do; who wasn’t even popular until he began following her around like that old cartoon skunk, smitten and besotted and buying her conventional romantic bullshit like flowers that she doesn’t want and chocolates that she doesn’t eat; who didn’t even know what the fuck to do with himself in bed, until she taught him. She doesn’t want anybody to ask her if she’s okay. So instead she goes upstairs, to where the tattoo place is, and she walks in and sits opposite Carmela, the receptionist, and they talk for a while. Carmela doesn’t know who she is in the context of the wider world; she’s just Lane, who comes in here for her ink. Carmella doesn’t strike Lane as the news-watching type.

  ‘Is he busy?’ Lane asks.

  ‘Only for another five minutes. What are you thinking?’

  ‘Another bud.’

  ‘I’ll put you down for an hour.’ She looks over at the door as the person before Lane – a heavy-set man in a jacket with Iron Man painted onto the back, his forearm bandaged – comes out. Behind him stands Reif. He’s got his needle in his hand, and he sticks his tongue out at Lane and wriggles it in lieu of actually saying hello. He’s had his tongue split, one of the many body mods he’s taken on over the years, and he’s trained himself to make each half of the tongue move of its own accord. Lane and he had a thing for a couple of weeks, after she began getting work done on the vine. She hated kissing him with it; the things he would do, rolling his tongues around hers, searching her teeth, like tentacles digging around inside her mouth. He talked to her about the other things he could do with it, if she would only let him. After that, she broke it off with him, told him that she had a boyfriend. Now, it’s a working relationship. She’s a model and muse (and occasional artist), and he’s doing his finest work on her skin.

  ‘Strip off and sit yourself down,’ he says. She pulls off her top and bra, crossing her arms across her chest, and she lies on his chair, face down.

  ‘Next bud,’ she says.

  ‘I’ve been waiting for this. Where are you thinking?’

  ‘Take it round, up between the shoulder blades.’

  ‘Okay. Know what you want on it yet?’ She usually brings him a sketch, a drawing, and he translates it. It’s all co-operative.

  ‘No. Just do the base.’ Her tattoo is to remember everything that happens in her life: the day-to-day, the events, indelibly rendered on her skin. She wonders when she will be filled up, when she will feel that there is no more skin – no more life – to paint onto herself. This one will remember this time. She doesn’t know what it will be.

  ‘Got an image in mind, even?’

  ‘Not yet,’ she says. ‘Words, probably. We’ll do it another time.’

 
; ‘Sure thing.’ He preps the needle and straddles her, sitting on her ass. He’s so light; thinner than her even, she thinks. ‘You’re a work of art, you know. You’re pretty much my masterpiece.’

  ‘I know,’ she says. He tells her to brace herself, but she doesn’t even really feel the needle any more. It’s a scratching on her skin, an itch that she can never reach herself.

  She’s sore when she’s done, resisting the urge to go at the newly bandaged skin. This is when it hurts most; when she’s out of there and she wants it to just be ready for the world. The design itself has gotten more complicated, both as Reif’s work has improved and as she has stopped balking as much at the pain of the procedure. The early leaves and stems are primitive, she thinks, as she looks at herself in the mirrored walls of the studio, the latter ones more delicate. Reif has said that he can go over the earlier ones again, adding texture in the blacks, the lines that run around and through the whole thing, but she’s refused. She likes that it’s crude. The point was always to capture times and places and events. It was about memories. She imagines that, by the end – she pictures the buds across her back, her chest, down her legs, with the final bud, whatever that may be, on the back of her head, pushing its way into her skull from her neck – by the end this will all be beautiful, and the final stems will be so well drawn that the progression will make even more sense. Something about it will become as whole as she is; or as she will one day become.

  She dresses and kisses Reif on the cheek, to say goodbye.

  ‘You’re really amazing,’ he says. ‘A work of bloody art.’ She kisses him again, to thank him. He’s unflinching in his devotion to her. She waves to Carmela, who is talking to another client, and she walks through the mall, shrugging off the ache on her back. She goes to a store and tries on a leather jacket, and she loves it – the hang of it on her body, the way it’s short enough to let her skin show through – and so she buys it. She doesn’t even think. She’s been saving money for years, every cent she’s ever earned or scrimped. It’s three hundred dollars, but some things, she reasons, are worth it. She goes to a small telephone store and buys a disposable SIM card and a cheap handset, and she syncs her contacts from the cloud and then dials William, who asks her how she is, and tells her how worried he’s been about her. She hears his mother’s voice in the background, asking about her as well. There’s always a first time to show any sign of giving a shit about somebody, Lane thinks. William’s mother asks if she wants to go and stay there for a while. She hangs up before William can tell her that he loves her, or something stupid like that. She doesn’t want this to play out this way.

  She wanders the food court and buys a plate of sushi from one of the vendors, but it’s warm and she can’t face the tuna, because it’s gone nearly full-brown; and then she makes her way to an electronics shop, thinking about buying herself a new camera, because that’s part of her future, she thinks. It’s something that she’s always wanted to do. Her father told her to do something artistic and she thinks that this could be her option. She’s good at drawing, but better at memories, at recording them. Maybe, when all of this ends, when life returns to being back how it was, she can think about it. She remembers what it used to be like, when Sean was alive. The two seem so linked in her mind: her father as being present, and her brother still being a part of their lives. She knows that it’s not why he pushed away, but she wishes that the two hadn’t happened at the same time. She wants him back, and everything else that they had.

  It’s like magic, the timing: she ends up in the television section of the store, and her family is on every set, broadcast in beautiful HD, beamed across all the sets in some fractured unity. There they all are, in some cases as large as day. Lane looks down at the far end of the shop and there, in the non-screen section, the video is filling the walls. The smell from the HoloGas projectors hits her and a 3D projection of her father steps out of those walls, brought forward, becoming manifest. Behind him, she sees herself, and her father’s eye glitches.

  ‘Can I help you?’ a voice asks. She turns quickly, to stop having to look. It’s a shop assistant, only a couple of years older than Lane. His face lights up, the gleam of seeing a celebrity. ‘Oh shit, it’s you!’ he says. ‘From the video. Oh my God!’ Lane turns and runs, sprints, through the shop. She pulls out the new cellphone and dials her mother’s number, but that’s dead, and her father’s. She can’t remember the number for the disposable phone her mother bought, so she keeps going to the bus stop, but there isn’t one waiting and she doesn’t want to stand here, she needs to keep moving. She gets into a cab and tells the driver an address around the corner from where she lives and the whole drive she tries to not make eye contact with him, even though he keeps glancing into the mirror, sizing her up. His car stinks of cigarette smoke and decaying plastic, and he sings under his breath to the songs on the radio, rock songs that Lane doesn’t know, but that just sound so very old to her.

  By the time she gets to the house, the news crews are talking, drinking coffees again, waiting for something, anything, to happen. Most of them are tucked into the backs of the vans, the doors swung wide, relishing the chance to sit and not pay attention to the house. They’ve gotten slack so quickly. She stays on the other side of the road, walking slowly, hidden behind cars so as not to be noticed. She’s at the front door and inside before they’ve even managed to get their cameras out.

  ‘You’re home,’ Deanna says. Her father and Amit are nowhere to be seen; just her mother and sister, watching telenovelas with the subtitles on.

  ‘Did they ask you anything?’ Deanna asks, standing and walking over to her eldest daughter.

  ‘I ran past them,’ Lane says. She grabs her mother’s arm and drags her out of the room, into the hall, and she pulls the door shut between them. She whispers, ‘We can’t keep this from her forever.’

  ‘We can try,’ Deanna says. ‘This will blow over.’

  ‘You really think?’ Lane asks. Deanna nods. She holds her daughter, pulling her in and wrapping her arms around her. Lane winces at the pain on her new tattoo, but doesn’t give herself away. They breathe each other in; old, familiar smells that will never change, no matter what body spray or perfume they might use.

  ‘We’ll find out way back to normal,’ Deanna says. She thinks, while they stand there and slightly sway in each other’s embrace, that she doesn’t remember what normal is any more: because normal was before politics; before they lost Sean; before any of this became a part of their lives that they simply didn’t have a chance of escaping from.

  ‘I hope it’s soon,’ Lane says. She’s sobbing into her mother’s shoulder. Deanna doesn’t know if she means the situation, or everything else.

  ‘Me too,’ she says.

  Amit reads Twitter while Laurence watches the news channels pick apart his statement. He looks gaunt on the screen, yes, but there’s a fire in his belly, or at least the imitation of one. The television show hosts talk about it in terms that they understand, the raised eyes of somebody controlling spin on their own terms, trying to get to grips with what has happened while still being unable to avoid irrefutable facts. Here, they have a video. They all have it, and they all show it, and they all talk about Laurence’s chances as a viable candidate after this.

  ‘If he overcomes this situation,’ one of them says, ‘maybe in another four, maybe eight years, he could run. Maybe, if he manages to prove that ClearVista screwed the pooch, gets the visual out of the public’s mind, and he can step up, use this somehow, run on issues relating to it; something to do with privacy and …’ He can’t finish the thought, because it just sounds so unconvincing.

  ‘He hasn’t got a chance,’ another says, in reply. ‘There is not a chance in hell of this man ever becoming our President. You try picturing Laurence Walker as he was before this video came out. You try it. Not going to happen, even if he spends the rest of his life saving puppies from fires and curing, I don’t know, curing cancer. It is simply never going to
happen.’

  He flicks to another channel. Bull Brady’s show is on. He’s at his desk, ten-gallon hat on his head, and there’s a picture of three men – Laurence and the other two candidates – hanging from a wire that runs above him.

  ‘It’s now a two-horse race, Homme and Maitland. And that pretty much means it’s a one-horse race, right? Homme’s going to be the next Democratic nominee, staunch left be damned, so get your voting buttons printed, your leaflets, your websites prepared. Because Laurence Walker? He’s out of this.’ He takes a Zippo lighter from his pocket and he flicks it with one hand, the skill of a lifelong cigar smoker, and he holds it up to the printed photograph of Laurence. It catches immediately, obviously pre-treated, and the flames rush up and over Laurence’s face. It flakes away and Bull laughs as people run in with fire extinguishers. ‘Yeah, you put that out,’ he says. ‘That is done.’ He laughs. Amit reaches over and switches off the set.

  ‘I don’t know what to say,’ he tells Laurence.

  ‘No, you don’t.’ Laurence keeps his eyes on where the screen was: focused on the wall now, intently staring. ‘You’re fired,’ he says.

  ‘Laurence!’

  ‘This leaked because of you.’

  ‘I didn’t do anything—’

  ‘Just go.’ He doesn’t look at him, not once. Amit stands up.

  ‘Okay,’ he says, ‘your call. I’m still talking to ClearVista, to find out what happened. I want to know. I take it you do as well.’ Laurence doesn’t reply. ‘You’re a good man, Laurence. I’ve seen it. I know it.’ He leaves the room and heads downstairs. Deanna looks over at him.

  ‘You’re leaving?’ she asks.

  ‘He fired me. Says it’s my fault.’

  ‘Oh.’ She doesn’t ask if it is. Everything is, and nothing. If this all blows over, Deanna thinks, Amit should be commended; he’ll have dragged Laurence out of politics, which – she now realizes – is something she’s wanted for the longest time.