by Anne Brooke
I clean up the office, and after a while take on a few new cases. They don’t grip me in the same way, but bring in some much-needed money. I stop thinking I’ll see Jade each time I look up and notice her empty desk. Sometimes I can even manage half a day without wondering where she is. I miss her. I miss her dazzle and glitter, the sense she always gave me that life was fuller than I’d imagined and there was more to hope for than I could guess. I wish I’d had the chance to tell her this is what I’ll remember. Always. Twice I visit her parents. The awkwardness is fading. It helps all three of us to be together, to talk about her, or at least I like to think so, but maybe I’m fooling myself. All I know is they don’t turn me away.
Once, on Wednesday 27 October, I think about calling my own parents but decide not to. Not for a while. On that day, I sit in my office, unplug the phone, and light a candle, watching it flicker as it burns. And I remember Teresa at 3.29pm, the last time I saw her, twenty-five years ago. I think also I might cry a little, but I can’t be sure.
So the autumn ticks by, the days grow colder and the long nights longer. There’s a feeling in the air as if something is changing, but I don’t know what. When I get up in the morning and look in the shaving mirror, each time I expect to see something different, and each time I’m disappointed. Same green eyes, same dark hair, same hunted expression. I look a little older. At least I’m alive, I tell myself; I’m alive and others are not.
When I say this to Andrew, he smiles and lets me talk. Not that I’m going as often as before, but when I’ve got the cash, I find it helps. I’ll have my final session one day soon, and I’ll walk away and not make another appointment at his front desk. I’ll keep his card, though, just in case.
And I have a sense of waiting. I don’t know what for. It’s as if I’m marking time, looking for some kind of permission to be given or a point to be reached to allow my feet to choose a path I can’t yet see. The journey into darkness, the chance of a light. This isn’t something I talk about at any of my sessions during those autumn weeks, but it’s as real as if it’s been carved on my skin, as real as the physical scars I carry. I can neither ignore it nor confront it. The rules I’ve made my life by are vanishing, and I don’t know what may be left to replace them.
Most often, that knowledge keeps me awake at night, my skin as cold as loss. But sometimes it gives me a sense of standing in a city square with no borders and all around me a sense of space. Inviting, dangerous, unexplored.
Dominic, of course, doesn’t stay in police custody for long. In a matter of days he’s granted bail and released on condition that he reports on a regular basis to the police. This small break in his routine is no balance against the misery caused to Starlight, Dancer, Bluesky, or Aqua or any of the hundreds of others. To him the two things are not even comparable, he being rich and they being poor. When I think of that and all that he told me the night I nearly died, the nausea lurches up, and I have to stand, panting like a dog, over the sink until the sickness subsides again.
Still, riches can’t help every situation. There will be a trial. I wonder how long it will be before he goes to court and how long the sentence will be. He’ll have good lawyers, and even though the media have spent countless column inches telling us their outrage at the crime, the punishment will never be enough. I wonder what he thinks when he considers the rapid downhill track that DG Allen Enterprises is on and when he might be free again to start another business. A man like that won’t disappear into obscurity. It’s not who he is. Finally I wonder what this will do to his marriage and how much he might miss his children.
In the middle of November, at the start of one of the coldest nights I have known, he comes to see me.
When I open the door to him, I wonder if this after all is what I’ve been waiting for. Even so, for a blink of time, I don’t recognise him — he’s grown older, and his face, almost gaunt, has new lines. Still, despite myself, despite what I know, it’s as if my blood is singing.
‘Dominic,’ I say, before I can control myself.
He doesn’t answer, and I gaze at him. Without glancing away, I reach out sideways until I feel the shape of the emergency cigarette packet on the hall table. I pull one free, pick up the lighter from the drawer, and offer him the cigarette. He almost drops it, so instead I take it, ease it into his mouth, and light it for him.
‘Thank you,’ he says and stands there, unmoving apart from the slight shake of his body.
Glancing beyond him, I see no-one else. ‘Did you come on your own?’
‘Yes.’
‘Where are you living now?’
He names a location on the eastern outskirts of the city, the sort of area he hasn’t been used to for a long time. Maybe he sees my surprise, because he almost smiles. ‘No money, Paul.’
‘What about your family?’ I ask. ‘Do you see your children?’
‘Yes, sometimes, when Cassie allows it. But not alone, never alone. Are you...? Are you all right now? Your injuries, I mean?’
The night air gusts in between us like memory and I shiver. ‘Yes, I’m fine. Thanks. Look, what do you want, Dominic?’
He hesitates, drops his cigarette on the step, and crushes it underfoot. ‘I want to talk to you.’
‘Don’t you think you’ve said enough?’
‘This is different.’
I step to one side. ‘You can have ten minutes. No more.’
‘Thank you.’
In the living room, he paces across the carpet, touching the wall, a chair, the mantelpiece. He runs his fingers along a line of books on the shelf, his movements jerky. I watch him from the doorway and wait until he turns to me.
‘You won’t believe me,’ he says, ‘but I’m sorry for what happened. For using you, threatening you. I didn’t realise...no, that’s no excuse for anything. There isn’t an excuse. I’m sorry.’
He’s right. I don’t believe him, but that isn’t what I’m interested in.
‘Why didn’t you cut me loose?’ I ask him. ‘Why didn’t you let me be destroyed? You said you would when that moment came. I was ready. In the end, I was ready. But you didn’t do it.’
He looks puzzled as if it’s an issue he’s worried at himself over many days and weeks but has been unable to turn up the answer. I can imagine how, in the middle of everything else going on, that must have angered him. He’s always prided himself on knowing the answers.
‘Why not?’ I say.
‘It’s stupid, isn’t it?’ he says, almost smiling. ‘You can work out your life for so long. You can know exactly how you’ll react to every situation you have to face, make strategies to win and win again, until winning is your trade, nothing else. There’s no room for mistakes or for pity. Only for success. And then something happens, something you don’t expect, and there are no more strategies or action plans. At least, not ones that fit. Something comes free, Paul, it comes free, and it can’t be put away again. When it came to it, I cut everyone adrift, everyone and everything I’d ever known, in order to try to save myself. My job, my company, my home, my friends — what there are of them — and my life. Even Cassie and...and my children.’ He passes one hand over his eyes, and I almost want to comfort him, maybe even touch him, but I can’t move to do it. ‘Even my children. Henry, Judith. Everyone. Everyone, except you.’
‘Why not?’ I ask again. ‘Why not me?’
‘I wanted to, very much,’ he says, and as always his capacity for a kind of reality pierces me. ‘But when it came to it, I couldn’t do it. Not to you. The truth is...the truth is I love you, you see. More than anything, more than myself. And I know...I know that nothing I can do will ever be enough for what I’ve done. Maloney’s Law — I crucified it, didn’t I? And you. But try to understand now that I love you, and for once in my life I’m telling you the truth. And because of it I want to ask you one question.’
He stops then, and when he glances at me his face is wet with tears. I have never seen him cry before.
‘What quest
ion is that?’ I ask.
‘Maloney’s Law,’ he whispers. ‘Please, Paul. Do you think, one day, you can trust me again?’
In the silence, when I look at him, the path before me is clear and for the first time I’m not afraid.
‘I’m sorry, Dominic,’ I say. ‘There are more laws than just one. Though you think what you’re telling me is true, it’s also true that friendship is more important than love. Jade taught me that. And you and I, we’ve never been friends.’
Chapter Twenty
When the papers are gathered, I place them into the metal bin. It’s large enough to take them all if I press them down. Then I lean back against my desk for a moment, wiping both hands upwards over my face and through my hair. Four days, nineteen hours, and thirty-seven minutes have passed since Dominic and I parted, for the final time, I think. I hope, I hope. It’s enough, it’s time.
I remove the battery from the smoke alarm, take up the lighter I’ve brought from home, and flick the flame over the first layer of paper. It catches more easily than I’d imagined, and I watch the papers and photographs and print blacken and burn. After a minute, the fire is fierce, but it’s contained. I’m not afraid.
When it’s over, I replace the alarm battery, pour water over the ashes, take the empty folder that has for so long contained everything I have collected about Dominic, and bury it deep in the cabinet. One day I might use it again for some other case, but not yet. Still I’m glad I’ve done this in the office. Fire has a cleansing property.
The day is not quite finished yet. I have one more duty to perform.
The Bell and Book is quiet tonight. Soon it will be December and then the end of the year, the beginning of the next. With it comes a chance to start again maybe, I don’t know. All I know is the sense of waiting, of marking time, that’s haunted me since Dominic was arrested has gone. All I’m left with is the open space and the possibilities of the journey to come.
I shake my head free of its thoughts. No time for philosophy. I’m here for a purpose and I should fulfil it. It’s Monday night after all. 6.13pm.
At the bar I order two drinks and pay with a fifty pound note. It’s all I’ve got. The barman sighs, shrugs, and scrabbles for change. I pocket the coins but clutch the notes, carrying them and my order across to the table in the corner. Our usual. No, my usual now.
After putting down the drinks, I sit down and open my wallet to put the notes in. As I do so, something drops to the floor. Something small. A white rectangle. I pick it up and see it’s Craig’s card, from my night in Soho one month and ten days ago. It’s crumpled but the print is still clear. Smiling with the memory, I read it for the first time. Craig Robertson, it tells me. Professional Model and Actor. That makes sense, he was a good-looking bastard. Slim enough for it, too. I believe what it says as he didn’t have the style of a hooker. Too straightforward, and he didn’t ask for money. Not much of a job, but then again neither is mine. I turn the card over. On the back is his home address, phone number, and mobile number, and for a moment or two, I think about calling, but it’s probably too late. He won’t remember me; the young move on so quickly. Still I don’t throw it away. Instead, for reasons I can’t explain, I bring the card briefly to my lips before slipping it into my back pocket and feeling the reassurance of its shape against my skin.
Maybe, I think. Maybe. But not today. Not yet.
Right now, in the glittering, changeable present, I reach over the table, raise the glass of Chardonnay and smile.
‘Happy birthday, Jade,’ I say. ‘Dazzle them in heaven.’
Anne Brooke has been writing for 18 years and is the author of six novels, numerous short stories and poems. Previous novels include A Dangerous Man (gay crime) and Thorn in the Flesh (psychological thriller) and Pink Champagne and Apple Juice (romantic comedy). She loves dark-haired men, has never met a chocolate she doesn’t like and once took a dawn balloon flight over the Nile (though she spent most of the time screaming).
Her fiction has been shortlisted for the Harry Bowling Novel Award, the Royal Literary fund Award, and the Asham Award for Women Writers, and longlisted for the Betty Bolingbroke Kent Novel Award. In addition, she has twice been the winner of the DSJT Charitable Trust Open Poetry Award.
She lives in the UK and is happily married to the best dark-haired man in the world, who is constantly astonished by her novels.
Find more information at www.annebrooke.com or www.myspace.com/ annebrooke. She also keeps a terrifyingly honest journal at annebrooke.blogspot.com
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
