Cold Hands

by John Niven

  We hiked up over the bypass and through the woods. Then up round the lake and north into the forest. We camped beside a stream – put the tents up and lit a fire.

  It was great – we ate the beans and spaghetti hoops around the fire as the late-summer dusk closed in. It felt like we were on the edge of the world, in some remote primitive wilderness, not just in some woods less than a mile from a public park. As it got darker, you could feel an edge of apprehension creeping in, but the crack and hiss of ring pulls soon dispelled that: the lager and the vodka warming our blood, making us feel invincible as we sat around the campfire trying to tell ghost stories, but winding up talking about girls from school, about sex.

  ‘Karen McLintoch?’ Alec said. ‘Ah fingered her daft at the Christmas disco, man.’

  ‘Did ye fuck!’ Tommy said.

  ‘Ah swear oan ma maw’s life,’ Alec said. ‘Mind, Banny? Up the back o’ the hall, by the Christmas tree?’

  ‘Who gies a fuck?’ said Banny, opening his second beer, the foam running down the can as he brought it quickly to his lips, trying not to waste any. He burped, then said, ‘McLintoch’s a fucking bike, man. Every cunt’s been up her. Ah fucken rode her at Stevie Blair’s big brother’s party.’

  ‘No way,’ Alec said.

  ‘You wantin yer jaw tanned?’ Banny said. ‘Like I’d make it up about riding that monster?’

  ‘She’s a’right,’ Tommy said.

  ‘Karen McLintoch?’ Banny said. ‘She’s a coupon like a skelped erse, man.’

  ‘Aye, well, you’re the cunt that rode her!’ Alec said.

  ‘Too right,’ Banny said, standing up. ‘Ye don’t look at the fucken mantelpiece when yer poking the fire, wee man.’ He burped and headed into the bushes, unzipping his fly. The three of us laughed, the usual reflexive, slightly manic laughter that Banny’s jokes were afforded, Tommy slapping his knee and repeating ‘Ye don’t look at the mantelpiece when yer poking the fire! True enough, man!’

  Alec and I looked at each other across the fire. The woodsmoke was stinging my eyes so I couldn’t be sure, but Alec had stopped laughing quicker than us and I thought I saw him shaking his head.

  I remember taking a gulp of neat vodka that was just a little too much: the sour taste as water seemed to pump from the underside of my tongue, flooding my mouth and then I was stumbling off into the trees, vomit spraying over bushes and tree trunks. The shouts and laughter and jeering of the others and the next thing I knew I was moaning and crawling into one of the tents and passing out.

  I woke up in the middle of the night, fully clothed in the sleeping bag, writhing awake from a dream of flesh and sex. It was silent and freezing cold, a faint glow and crackle from the dying campfire outside. I was on my side and I had an erection, a dull, aching pressure in my groin. It took a moment to realise that a hand was inside my jeans, clamped around my cock. I felt breath on my neck and then Banny’s voice. ‘C’mon,’ he whispered, his breath short, urgency in his voice. ‘C’mon . . .’

  I remember my body going rigid. Stiffening with fear, my heart seeming to stop. I stared into the cold darkness and felt him pressing against me from behind.

  I started to cry.

  It seemed to take a moment for him to realise what I was doing. A moment before he muttered a disgusted ‘Fuck sake, man . . .’ He let go of me and rolled away, turning his back. I lay there for a long time, blinking cold tears in the darkness until I finally fell asleep again just before dawn.

  It was never mentioned and within a few days I convinced myself that I had dreamt it.

  16

  BY 4 P.M. THAT Friday it was already getting dark and I was standing in parka, muffler and boots at the bus stop. The storm was well under way; the snow coming in sideways, so thick I could just make out the orange lights of the school bus as it rattled slowly up the hill towards me. I was jittery, having drunk a big pot of coffee during the afternoon, trying to blast away the sleepy effects of the lunchtime beer.

  ‘Daddy!’ Walt yelled as he came carefully down the icy steps towards me, the two Franklin boys behind him. A blast of heat and steam rolled out of the bus behind the kids, Ted the bus driver sitting high up in the brightly lit cab. ‘How are the roads?’ I asked, raising my voice above the growling diesel.

  ‘Main highways are about passable. Moving real slow. I don’t know how much longer you’ll be able to get all the way up here, though. This is my last stop.’

  ‘OK, thanks, Ted.

  I got Walt into the house, dried off and sat in front of some cartoons with his snack – milk and toast with peanut butter – and called Sammy’s cell, getting only soft, feminine tones telling me ‘the person you are trying to reach is currently unavailable’, the voice smug, almost upbeat, reminding you of the blandly malevolent computers beloved of sci-fi; Mother from Alien, Hal from 2001. I called the office and Kelly, Sammy’s PA, picked up.

  ‘Hi, Kelly, is Sammy still there?’

  ‘No. She left before lunch. Said she had to meet someone and she’d probably go straight home. I thought she’d be back by now.’

  ‘Uh, no. I – A current of fear.

  ‘Have you tried her cell?’

  ‘Unreachable. Who was she meeting?’

  ‘I don’t know, seemed a bit last minute, Donnie. Wasn’t in her diary.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘She’s probably just stuck in traffic with no cell signal.’

  ‘OK. Thanks, Kelly. I’ll keep trying her.’

  ‘Have a nice weekend.’

  ‘You too.’

  I hung up and flipped on the TV, channel-hopping till I got the local weather, the reporter in parka standing in front of a shot of traffic on Highway 10 out of Regina, snow blowing around him, behind him red tail lights as far as you could see one way, white the other as he said, ‘. . . backed up on Highways 10, 5 and 1. The good news is that most major routes are still open, the gritters are out in force and people should be able to complete their journeys, it’s just going to take a little time . . .’ I thumbed the sound back down. She was just stuck in that tailback, maybe even in one of the cars in shot. No cell signal because of the weather. Worst-case scenario she’d make it as far as Alarbus tonight and check into the Grange and we’d figure it out in the morning. It’d be fine.

  I walked over to the wall of glass and looked out towards the highway, to where a pair of headlights were slowly making their way along the road. They passed the house, becoming red tail lights, then an orange signal started blinking and the car took the next turning along from us. Irene, making it home from wherever she’d been. The roads were still passable then. I checked the clock and saw it was just after five. I decided I might as well start dinner. As I opened the bottle of thick Shiraz and poured myself a glass, I told myself I was going to use some for the sauce anyway, and tried to ignore the voice saying, ‘That beer at lunchtime? Wine at five? You’re drinking more than you usually do. You’re nervous – aren’t you?’

  When the rice started to bubble and the oven behind me was hot, I quickly scored the duck breasts with the big Global chef’s knife, cutting four lines across each one, through the fat and just into the flesh. I pressed sea salt and Chinese five-spice into each cut and then rubbed a little olive oil over them. While I was doing this the heavy orange grill pan was heating on the front burner, wisps of smoke starting to curl up from its bars. I slapped the duck skin-side down onto the pan and they crackled and hissed, sending smoke up into the chrome hood. I turned the extractor fan on as Walt ambled into the kitchen.

  ‘What’s for dinner?’

  ‘Duck, son,’ I quack-quacked. ‘Here, you can help me.’

  ‘Aww, not peeling garlic!’ One of Walt’s most hated souschef tasks.

  ‘No, relax.’ I passed him the steamer that would fit neatly on top of the rice pot and a pound bag of spinach. ‘Open that and put the spinach in the steamer.’

  Walt looked at the big bag of emerald-green leaves. ‘There’s only three of us, Dad.’
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  ‘I know. It shrinks a lot when you cook it.’

  ‘When’s Mommy back?’

  ‘She might be late, with the weather. We’ll go ahead and eat first.’

  I sipped my wine and watched the boy fumblingly set about his task. ‘How was school? Anything happen?’

  ‘Josh Barrett got in trouble again.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘He’s such a douchebag.’

  ‘Walt! Don’t say that.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘I . . . do you even know what it means?’

  ‘Like, an idiot or something?’

  ‘Well, no. It . . . just don’t say it, OK?’

  Walt thought for a moment, stuffing leaves into the steamer, some spilling onto the counter, the floor. ‘Can I say he’s a douche?’

  ‘No! You can say . . . doofus.’

  ‘Doofus? Christ, Dad.’

  ‘Walt,’ I said.

  ‘OK, OK. He’s a doofus. What does that even mean?’

  ‘I think it means a cross between stupid and foolish. So what did he do, Josh Hartlett?’

  ‘Josh Barrett. Right, OK. Well, you know Miss McGovern doesn’t let people eat candy in class? So he . . . no, wait, first Alex Trower said, he –’

  And Walt was off, telling his eight-year-old’s tale: a monologue of non sequiturs, digressions and asides. Characters would appear randomly and then disappear having had no real bearing on events whatsoever. At the end of his story no conclusions would have been reached and no real information would have been imparted. It was like . . . like reading one of my screenplays.

  Half listening, I used long-handled tongs to turn the duck breasts: just four minutes and the skin had crisped nicely. I gave them a couple of minutes on the other side and then transferred them to a roasting tray and put them into the oven. Another five minutes or so in there for medium rare. ‘Dad?’ Walt was asking me.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Do you think it hurt Herby? When the car hit him?’ Walt’s voice quiet, not looking up at me, concentrating on the spinach.

  I came closer and set my wine down. ‘No, son. Probably not. He wouldn’t have known anything about it.’

  That agonised, teethbared snarl.

  ‘I keep thinking about him.’

  ‘So do I.’ I put my hand on his arm. ‘That’s normal, Walt.’

  ‘Do you think, one day, we can get another dog?’

  ‘Sure.’

  He’d almost bitten his tongue off.

  ‘I wouldn’t want to call him Herby though.’

  ‘We’ll call him whatever you like. Anything but douchebag.’ Walt laughed at the forbidden word and, warmed by the wine, I saw an opening. ‘Look, Walt, I’m sorry about the other day. For losing my temper over the phone thing.’

  ‘S’ OK,’ he shrugged.

  ‘I just, when I was a kid . . . I didn’t have things like you do. Sometimes it’s hard for me when I see you being so careless. But I shouldn’t have shouted at you like that.’

  ‘Did your uncle shout at you when you were little?’ Walt only knew the official backstory.

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘Were you bad a lot?’

  ‘I guess I could be. Here, gimme that . . .’ I took the full steamer and popped it on top of the rice. ‘Now watch this.’

  I put the grill pan I’d cooked the duck in back on the burner and turned it all the way up till the dry pan was crackling. I tipped a glass of wine in there and it erupted, fizzing and bubbling crazily. I tilted the pan, letting the flames from the burner lick into the liquid, and blue-orange flames leapt a couple of feet up into the air.

  ‘Woah!’ Walt laughed.

  I blew the flames out and scraped at the bars with a wooden spoon, stirring tiny bits of caramelised duck into the sauce, adding a cube of butter to thicken it further, bringing a glossy shine to it. I reduced the heat and let it bubble gently, reducing. ‘OK,’ I said, clapping my hands together, ‘dinner’ll be ready in five minutes. Let’s just try your mom again.’ I picked up the cordless, hit the speed dial and brought the phone up to my ear. I jerked it away quickly when all I got was a single, shrill tone. I jabbed the button to hang up and released it, getting the same dead tone.

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘I think the phone line might be down.’

  ‘Down where?’

  ‘It means it’s broken. Maybe because of the storm.’

  I picked up my cell – nothing, not a bar of signal now – and sighed. ‘Don’t worry. I’m sure Mom’s fine.’ I reached for the bottle of Shiraz and noticed it was three-quarters empty. I drained it into my glass anyway. ‘Come on then. Let’s get some plates. How about we eat in front of the TV? Catch a movie?’ A rare treat, generally forbidden by Sammy.

  ‘Yaayyy,’ Walt said as, behind him, the snow came down through the dark night and pummelled noiselessly against the thick glass.

  Were you bad a lot?

  * * *

  We didn’t talk about the actual crime for a long time, many months. It was the late winter of ’84, February or early March, the trees outside still bare, the sky stark and then black by five o’clock, and we were onto Shakespeare now. Mr Cardew was not yet Paul, that was still some way off, but we’d grown comfortable with each other. He had a way of opening up the parts of myself I had to shut off to survive in the institute. I see now that he was showing me that who I was at this time, in this place, did not have to define who I would become.

  We were doing Macbeth, for O-level English, and we’d been reading the scene where Duncan’s wife and baby are killed. I was quiet. He put his book down, removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. ‘In your own time,William,’ he said quietly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Whatever’s on your mind. In your own time.’

  I looked at my shoes, the plastic prison shoes, and spoke softly through the fringe that hung down covering my face. ‘People hate us. Hate me.’

  ‘Who hates you?’

  ‘Everyone. For what we did.’

  I peeked up through my fringe. He was chewing on the stem of his glasses, looking away from me. Silence in that sad, grey room. ‘Well,’ he said after a long time, ‘I often find people’s capacity to be surprised by the cruelty of children surprising. Look at the situation we just had there in Cambodia. Wee boys with machine guns leading the charge. People want to think you’re a monster, William, because that’s easy. An easy thing to think.’

  ‘Maybe I am. A monster.’

  ‘“As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport.” It’s from another play. King Lear. Do you know what “wanton” means, in the sense Shakespeare uses it here?’

  I shook my head, fighting tears.

  ‘Cruel. Unjust. Merciless.’

  ‘We didn’t mean it.’

  He took my head and brought it to his chest as I wept. And I said it for the first time, the thing that had been building in me since I came here, since I got my mum’s letter.

  ‘What . . . what’s going to happen to me?’

  Tobacco and aftershave, the itch of his suit on my cheek as he took my face in his hands and looked into my eyes.

  ‘Listen to me, William. Listen now.’ I took deep breaths and controlled the sobbing. ‘You did a terrible thing, you and your friends. But you can still grow up to be a good man. And don’t let anyone tell you different. Do you understand?’

  I just looked at him. He gripped my face tighter and said more urgently, ‘Do you understand me, William? This is important.’

  I nodded.

  ‘Good boy,’ Mr Cardew said.

  17

  WE ATE OUR meals – Walt leaving most of the slithery green spinach leaves, burying them under rice and cutlery – on trays on our laps in front of the big TV in the living room, the one that lived in an armoire, where the doors folded back to reveal the TV and stereo equipment. (Sammy had been the first person I’d known who thought it ‘tacky’ to have
a giant TV as the focal point of a room.) Flipping aimlessly we’d found Toy Story 3 about halfway through on one of the movie channels and stayed with it, even though we had it on DVD anyway. (There is always something more exciting about discovering a movie already playing rather than laboriously putting it on yourself.)

  I say ‘we’ watched it but really I was somewhere else, doing calculations in my head: Say she had a long lunch, finished about three, got on the road then, normally an hour’s drive, say two or even three hours with the weather, she’d be getting into Alarbus about now, she’d maybe try a payphone, but the fucking line’s down. Could she send an email from her BlackBerry if she had Wi-Fi? I checked my email on my iPhone – nothing.

  I tuned back into the movie, near the end now, the toys all in that huge garbage incinerator, sliding down a slushy mountain of landfill towards the fires of hell, towards certain doom. Solemnly they accept their fate. Tenderly they begin to hold hands, preparing to meet death with dignity and love. Suddenly, inevitably, tears were springing to my eyes and I was pulling Walt towards me on the sofa, folding his little head onto my heaving chest. ‘Don’t cry, Daddy,’ Walt said automatically. ‘It’s going to be OK.’ I cry easily at most films but anything to do with childhood, with innocence . . .

  Maybe I should just get both of us wrapped up and try and make it over to Irene’s and see if her phone’s still working. What if she has to spend the night in the car? She’d be OK as long as she could keep the heater running. When did she last fill up the tank? Last night, that’s right. On the way to her parents’ party, so –