by Anne Brooke
The sky promises more sunshine as I step outside for the ten-minute walk to Maloney Investigations. Even the air seems brighter, the dry grass greener, and everyone I meet is smiling — unusual for Hackney at the best of times. It’s the sort of day that can’t help but hold good things ahead, and everyone is picking up on it. One of the rare London days where work will be simple, I’ll get one step closer to some good Delta Egypt evidence, I’ll discover Dominic’s innocence, I’ll take on a lucrative new client, Jade will forgive me, and, even though it’s a Wednesday rather than a Monday, it will be an evening for sitting outside drinking beer and talking. Hey, maybe I’ll even take her up to the West End, treat her to a show or something, one of those musicals she loves and I can’t stand, but what does it matter because I’ll be making a friend happy. I’ll have a couple of beers inside me and the delicious memory of Dominic to relive. Again and again.
Yes, it’s going to be a great day. The best. Or one of them. Nothing can be as good as yesterday.
Turning down the narrow path to the office, I can see Jade’s bike chained up to the railings as I take the steps two at a time, marshalling my excuses for lateness. Key in the door, I yell out, ‘Hi, Jade, it’s me, sorry I’m late. I was just...’
Once inside, my voice trails away. The place is a mess. Drawers and cabinets lie open, their files and papers scattered across the carpet. One of the computers has been torn from the wall, its cables wilting like long fingers over the desk, the hard drive buckled and bent. My table lamp has been smashed, as has one window. As I take a step forward, fragments of glass crackle under my feet. There’s an acrid smell I can’t quite place, but all the time my mind is working; don’t disturb anything, you’ll have to call the police on this one, I’ll need to see if anything’s been taken first, find out what they know, when Jade comes I’ll... Jade.
‘Ja-ade?’ My voice echoes off the walls, and there’s no response. And already I’m racing across the office, feet scrabbling on paper and glass, legs knocking against the upturned table, and I’m punching in 999 on my mobile, the vision of her bicycle outside tearing through my heart. ‘Jade?’
When I slam open the kitchen door, she’s lying across the tiles. She’s dressed in the ruby suit and cream shirt she’d been wearing last night, an oversize ruby earring hanging forlornly across her pale cheek. Almost the same colour as the ugly red gash across her throat. Her blue eyes are staring blankly and have no light in them.
‘Jade!’ I’m on the floor next to her, knees collapsing, no way of keeping upright or knowing how to any more. There’s the sound of my own ragged breath, and from nowhere the voice of authority in my ear and I’m sobbing, gulping out words I can’t make sense of, ‘Yes, Ambulance, Police, please, now.’
Then I drop the phone as if it’s on fire. With no care or understanding for the rules of the profession I’ve counted as mine, I bend down, gather her into my arms and rock her against my chest, crooning, murmuring endearments as if somehow I could wake her up and bring her back to me again.
This is how the police find us.
Chapter Ten
Time stops. It hangs like dark clouds over the earth and blocks out the movement of the sun. The stars are unhooked from their moorings, and the sky floats down. There are questions, so many questions, from men with hardness in their eyes and from men with pity, and there’s blood on my hands I can never cleanse, even though I didn’t wield the knife.
If only I’d been there. I should have been there. I might have been able to help.
I should have been there. This is a phrase I repeat over and over again, sitting at tables, drinking harsh coffee, standing up and leaning against chill white tiles as I piss the coffee away while outside a policeman waits.
I don’t know how long the questions continue or how long the police go on thinking that the murderer might be me or that I know something more they can’t get me to say. What I know is outside my capability of telling. Even if that were untrue, I would still remain silent about the things that don’t matter now, for a reason I can no longer handle the reaching after. My grip on passing time, which has sustained me for so long, tumbles away, and I’m left spinning. The thought of Jade fills me with memories so sharp they are almost real, almost happening in the now. I see her smiling up at me from behind her computer, the warmth of her eyes, her laughter, even her disapproval, each subtle change of her face mirroring who she is. Who she was. But the finality of the past tense is beyond my understanding. Pictures of her mingle with dreams of Teresa so that instead of the office, the pub, the flat, I remember the garden, the swings, the way my sister loved the roses my father grew. Other memories too: the two of us blowing bubbles from a tube in the living room and laughing when they burst; the time I ran away with her favourite doll and she bit my arm to make me give it back; the time she sneaked me squares of chocolate when I caught chicken pox and then caught it herself from me. I’ll never see Teresa again, but it seems impossible I won’t see Jade, that I’m left without her, like before. I know these feelings are selfish, that there are others whose loss is far greater, but I can’t summon the strength to glance outside the fragile boundaries of my own existence. As much ask a drowning man to save himself. Besides, knowing the facts has never helped the truth of a thing. It’s never been enough to save me. The facts have nothing to do with the truth, and they are powerless to make a difference.
So during the dark days of September, in the first tides of autumn, I fall down the lines to the dark.
The hours mesh into one. The only things I see are the knowledge of my own failure to act on any of my promises and the terrifying impossibility of a future I can live by. I wonder about killing myself and imagine a multitude of ways to do this: lying in the bath until the water trembles cold against my body and then drifting down until it covers my chin, my mouth, my nose, my eyes, my hair. It will be hard not to try to hold my breath as I go underneath, but it will be quicker if I take that step, trust myself to breathe in the liquid, let it fill my throat and lungs until the pounding of my heart is stilled. For all time.
Or perhaps, it will be easier to use drugs, aspirin for instance, something that will not involve me in meetings with people I no longer know and transactions I cannot remember how to perform. Something simpler than the hard drugs hidden away in the dark corners of the city. The thought of it grips me. It won’t let me go. One evening, on a day whose place in the order of the week I can’t tell, this is what I do. I take the jar from the bathroom cabinet and pad to the kitchen. In my hand, the small white deadliness glitters and seems to sing. I sit down. For a long time I do nothing. When I’m ready to act, I unscrew the jar and tap out, one by one, the roundness of poison onto the table. It takes so little time. I line them up in rows of nine, the perfect number after which there are no new shapes, no new patterns, and when there are five of these, I stop and wonder how death will taste. Will it be heavy with the knowledge of finality? Or will it soothe me like a child into oblivion? Nothing but a small, apparent sleep, a cutting off from which there is no return. I take a line of these and, eased into a new but brief routine, am reaching out to take another when from nowhere a wave of nausea swoops up from within me. My stomach spasms into freefall, and I barely make the sink before I’m retching up pale powder and liquid and death. I retch and retch again until there’s nothing left but exhaustion.
When I wake, I’m huddled and shivering on the kitchen floor, one arm jammed against the table leg, and the remaining pills are scattered around me like confetti. I want to cry but can’t find the tears.
The days pass by, each second carved on my skin. I don’t know how to run from them. There is nothing I can do to bring Jade back. I think about starting to smoke again, if only to calm the tremble in my fingers I can’t control, and wonder why the energy to plunge back into the comfort of old addictions is no longer there.
Another day, and again I can’t remember the name of it, not even whether it’s a weekday or a weekend, I stand at
the window of my flat and gaze at the street outside. It must be evening or morning as it’s dark and the people I see are nothing but more solid shapes in haze. They head purposeful and unsmiling into the narrow boundaries of the view I have. I wish I could have that sense of journey, but it’s out of reach. As if I am watching my own falling, a leaf torn by wind from the tree and swinging downwards, I know my own foolishness and these feelings for what they are. Haven’t I walked this path before, after Dominic? I should know it for what it is, I should be able to control it, but all my limbs are weighed down, and I can’t act to save myself. As I couldn’t act to save Teresa, and as I couldn’t act, or acted too late, to save Jade.
I should have been there.
Instead I am here. Watching an unfamiliar world and knowing, though I can’t overpower it, that most of all I am afraid. Afraid enough to smash the glass in front of me with my bare fists, the shattered fragments of window slashing my wrists and arms, and step out into naked air. Wondering if I do so, whether the end will be quick and whether, once I have done what I can’t undo, I will see my sister and friend again, or whether all beliefs in a life beyond the one we know here are nothing more than fantasy and fairytale. If anyone knew, Jade would, and for a moment I see her. In my dreams or in the reality I am living in, I don’t know. But it’s real. I can see her fair hair, the sparkle of her deep blue eyes, the way her lips crinkled a little at the edges when she smiled, the dazzle of jewellery, and the perfume she wore. One step, one step only, would take me beyond the frame and into the deep unknown.
No way back. No forgiveness. The fault, the foolishness is mine, though those I love must bear it.
Still, I breathe, and only due to my own cowardice. Suicide will take courage and the easier choice is to live. As I think these things, the shape of her face in front of me shimmers and shrinks and changes to another much younger face, and again I cry out. The echo of my voice ravages my heart.
My last encounter with the seduction of death comes, I think, in the second week of my self-imprisonment.
It’s morning as I’m sitting at the kitchen table when I hear the soft thump of the post landing on the hall floor. The thought of getting up, fetching, and reading any letters passes my mind, an idea that I dismiss at once for being irrelevant. My skin smells sour, and my face itches with bristles. My mouth tastes empty and bitter; I haven’t eaten for a while.
Outside there’s the sound of cars and people and laughter, and an expansive feeling of calm nestles over me. My eyes are closed, and I know that whatever happens now, whatever I decide, will be lasting. Maybe even irrevocable.
This thought makes me smile. It’s been a long journey ’til now and soon, for good or bad, it will be over.
I take up the knife I’ve been playing with. It’s cold, a relief to the stifling warmth of my forehead. It’s as if the day will never be cool again, and the only comfort is the sense of icy steel on skin. It’s the one good kitchen knife I own. Something Dominic once told me comes to my memory: If you want anything in life, consider the best you can afford, and then pay a little more for what is better than the best.
This I have done. He will be proud of me.
Running the knife across my closed eyes, I feel its strength down my cheek, over the greater softness of my lips and onto the fragility of my neck. The blade nicks the skin there, and the sudden swell and iron scent of blood makes me gasp.
Not here, not now; it will be too hard.
My heart pounds its way to closure. Still bearing the knife, I draw it over my chest and across the tenderness of my upper left arm. There’s no hurry. Halfway down, I twist it in my fingers and force the blade into my flesh. There is a bubble of crimson and, yes, I would do it, I would do it now — keep going, keep going, Paul — but the pain is shocking, more shocking than I have reckoned on, and I hear someone — is it me? — gasp while the knife spins to the floor.
I did not reach my wrist, I didn’t reach it. But it doesn’t matter, it can’t matter because there is blood and pain driving me to my feet. For a long moment I am outside my body, watching myself as I stumble to the bathroom, struggling to stem the flow of blood on my arm, open the cabinet, and bring out a length of bandage. I curse myself over and over again, as if the words might fly up and rain down on me as a judgement, a retribution.
Now, here, where I have no more answers, no more plans, I begin to find the slow path upward. Still shaking, still unable to stand properly or for long, I lurch back to the kitchen where I left my mobile. It sits next to the knife on the floor where it must have fallen.
The sight of the knife makes me start to sweat, and I hear someone saying, though I don’t recognise it as me, ‘No. No, Paul, it’s over. Leave it, just leave it.’
And then, thank God, the phone is in my hand, and I’m dialling a number I still remember. When he answers, I recognise his voice and am taken back to the time when Jade first made me call him.
He says his name and his profession, counsellor, and then waits, but all I can say at first is, ‘Please, please, Andrew, help me.’
For a long while, he lets me talk, and here and there, when I most need it, talks to me in turn. While he does this, I am slumped at the table and have taken a pencil and am doodling on a shredded section of newspaper. I can hardly tell what I’m writing.
It’s only when my phone call is over and an appointment made for this afternoon that I look at the word I’ve written. The fact of it makes me struggle for a second or so for breath, and there is a roaring like the sea in my head.
Because the word I have written is Bluesky.
I should have been there.
Bluesky. It’s the one thought that makes me get up, counting myself lucky if the night before has held more than an hour or two of sleep. The dead woman and the puzzle of her make me leave the flat, now weary with dust, and pad like a beaten dog through the colour and noise of people until I reach the supermarket. There I buy groceries and go home, where I eat, not caring what it is or what it tastes like. It’s not much either, and I realise with a grimace that I don’t need to worry about my weight any more. If I had any excess, it’s gone now. Twice a week, I take the bus to Leyton, sit on a smooth chair in a light grey office, talk for an hour, and also listen to the questions Andrew sees fit to ask me.
Sometimes what he says or asks makes sense and sometimes it doesn’t. I give the answers or explore the possibilities in the language I soon pick up again as if my last extended session with him hadn’t been over two years ago. I gaze ’round at the bright but peaceful prints from the Scottish colourists he displays on his walls. While the words weigh down the air, my fingers touch, hold, and circle, one by one and always in the same order, each of the seven stones he keeps in a blue basin on the table, itself set just to one side of the two of us so there’s no barrier. The table always bears a small box of tissues.
I talk about Jade, my failure to keep her safe, the plans she had for the future, marriage, children, a house of her own, all the clichés I know she meant. When I say her name, though, the face I see is sometimes that of Teresa, the two of them blending into one, both running from me so I can save neither. Sometimes I don’t know which of them I’m talking about. Each session of soul-baring, each tide of words brings me closer to the shore I have drifted so far away from.
Of course I never talk about Dominic.
Between my conversations with Andrew, I stay at home as much as possible. I see no-one else, I speak to no-one else, as far as this can be done in the world I live in. I write, once only, to her parents, but the letter is written and rewritten so many times that I never send it. During this month of mist and memory, I don’t have the courage. At night all I do is read books I’ve read before, as I can’t sleep. Andrew suggests tablets that I buy but never take. One thing I’ve learnt, and learnt well from my past, is that some situations just have to be endured.
I don’t visit the office. Jade’s blood, the shape and feel of her fallen body, lies like a trap in m
y mind, so I do no work and pay no bills. This I do not tell Andrew. He doesn’t need to know.
And so the month passes. Somewhere at the end of it, I turn 31. I don’t celebrate my birthday, and neither do I open either of the cards I receive, one postmarked Surrey and one London.
All the time, there are only two questions in my head: Why has this happened again? And why wasn’t it me?
Above all, the knowledge I must somehow learn to live with: If I hadn’t slept that night with Dominic, then Jade would surely not be dead.
Nowhere, in all this time, do I learn how to weep. The one thing that keeps me going is thinking about Bluesky.
And wondering what I can do to find the truth.
Chapter Eleven
The police release Jade’s body on Thursday 30 September. This seems almost too soon for them to have decided there’s no hope of an arrest, but I don’t question it. Her funeral takes place on Tuesday 5 October. I only know this as a small plain postcard arrives on the hall floor the day before postmarked from Essex. When I turn it over it gives me the reason, the date, and the time and then a simple message, handwritten: We thought you’d like to know.
