Cold Hands

by John Niven

  Not for Craig. Always bright, always interested in things. He could hold a conversation when he was nine months. Read at three.

  He’d been a difficult birth. Nearly killed you. Forty hours in labour before they had to perform an emergency Caesarean. Then the complications, the return to surgery, the hysterectomy. But you had Craig. And you were so happy for a while, the three of you.

  Before that school.

  You’d find Craig in his room, with his homework books, taking him his milk and sandwich, and you’d know he’d been crying. The time he came home with the black eye and bruised, cut face. You’d gone berserk. Went to see the headmaster, even though Craig begged you not to, and got the boy that did it suspended. You’d wept and he’d held you, your little boy, and said, ‘Don’t cry, Mummy.’ After that you knew he wasn’t telling you everything that happened at school. (You realised much later it was because he didn’t want you to worry about him, and the pain of that realisation, of his consideration, after he was dead was more than your mind could bear. Already buckled, it snapped in half.)

  That May Saturday, the anxiety building within you as afternoon bled into early evening and then into nightfall and he still didn’t come home. Vomiting with fear. Then the drive to the police station, Stephen patting your hand while he drove, saying, ‘It’ll be fine, it’ll be fine. He’ll have got lost.’ And you already knowing, knowing something terrible had happened. The days that followed; a numbness, constant trembling, looking at the phone, watching the TV, the press conference and flashbulbs and people asking stupid, inane questions. (‘How do you feel?’) Then that moment – life ending – when the police car pulled up in front of the house that Thursday morning and you saw them walking up the drive, past the reporters who had gathered at the gate every morning for the last three days. You saw the expression of the lead policeman and you saw something in it beyond sorrow, beyond anxiety and nerves, you saw fear and that could only mean one thing.

  Stephen screamed when they told you both.

  You remember falling to your knees on the carpet, next to the coffee table, the world rushing around you, colours and smells seeming to intensify madly – the late daffodils on the table bright and pungent. The policeman’s shoes close to your face – boot polish and leather – as you folded in on yourself, shaking.

  How well you would remember the events of that last morning together in the years to come. You’d replay every moment, bringing out details, burnishing them, making them shine, making your pain so severe it felt like you would burst sometimes.

  As it was the weekend, you’d all had a leisurely breakfast together: boiled eggs and toast and tea for you and coffee for Stephen, Craig with his soldiers (he was growing out of it but you still liked to do it) and orange juice. That spot of yolk on his bottom lip, you can see it still, shining in the spring sunshine that flooded the kitchen. Radio Clyde on in the background, Stephen with the sports pages of the Herald and you with the news.

  He went to his room after breakfast to do some homework. That was the kind of wee boy you had – one who would do homework, unasked, on a Saturday morning. You popped your head round his door a little later to ask what he wanted in his sandwiches; cheese and ham, or just ham? He was at his desk, books and jotters spread out around him. ‘Just ham please,’ he’d said. (Did he? Did he say ‘please’? He often did, but not always. You so want that ‘please’ to have been there in this exchange.)

  He loved to go fishing in the spring and summer months. Stephen had always taken him when he was small but, just in the past year, since turning thirteen, he’d been allowed to go on his own as long as he was back well before dusk fell. And he was. He always was.

  You’d put the sandwiches in a Tupperware box and packed them in his canvas knapsack along with a carton of juice and a KitKat.

  Your last motherly duty.

  They fished the knapsack out of the river later, not far from his body. The sandwiches were still dry and uneaten, safely waterproofed in their plastic box. There was a ball of tinfoil in the knapsack too. He’d eaten the chocolate quickly, unable to wait. You often picture him doing this: breaking a finger off and munching it as he walked along the riverbank with his rod. Had he just finished eating it, you couldn’t help wondering, when he met them? Was there thick chocolate coating his tongue, bits of wafer between his teeth, when he came round the bend at that weir? He hadn’t been eating it when he met them, you knew that much. That ball of tinfoil, you knew it was from the KitKat wrapper – he hadn’t just thrown it on the ground like so many boys his age would have. If he’d been eating it when he met them he wouldn’t have had enough time to ball up the tinfoil and put it in his knapsack. He hadn’t littered. For many years, remembering just this detail would be enough to tear you apart, to have you pouring an extra inch or two of vodka into your glass.

  Not that Craig was perfect of course. He’d reached an age where his intelligence was beginning to outstrip your own and this occasionally brought out a sarcastic streak in him. He could be verbally witty, but he hadn’t yet learned to use it appropriately. More and more you’d found yourself having to tell him off for being cheeky. Stephen was more relaxed about it, feeling that by the time he was sixteen or seventeen he would be a formidable conversationalist, a shoo-in for the sixth-form debating team, which would look good on his UCCA form.

  He wasn’t sure what exactly he wanted to do yet – he loved science, he especially adored his physics teacher Mr Cummings – but Stephen was already talking excitedly about Craig going to Glasgow University, where he had gone. About how the two of you would go up and visit him: lunches on Byres Road, walks through Kelvingrove Park and the leafy Gothic quads in the autumn of first term, Craig’s first term, October 1987. ‘Och,’ you would say, ‘he’s only thirteen. Let’s see how his O levels go first . . .’

  The trial, those three boys, bored, nervous and smirking in the dock. The details that emerged.

  Splinters of fibreglass in his rectum.

  Five days in the cold salty water.

  Your baby boy.

  ‘Full fathom five thy son lies; of his bones are coral made: those are pearls that were his eyes.’

  Fish feeding on the blood and viscera. Burrowing inside him. Flies laying their eggs inside him, maggots ripening in his flesh, in the beautiful smooth skin you used to bury your face in, tickling him, inhaling his baby perfume. Rats gnawing at him as he floated face down in the dun river. His expression as those boys beat and whipped him and he looked up and felt the incredible degree of cruelty ranged against him. How he must have screamed when they . . .

  And you do this every night. Every hour. He dies again and again. New details are imagined and added. Every night Craig screams for you to help him and you just sit and watch.

  So. You go insane. Little by little you go completely insane.

  In a way it was better for you. You just shut down. You stopped living. You’d be clearing away the breakfast things in the kitchen and your legs would buckle beneath you. You’d sit down on the floor, your back against the wall, and the next thing you knew the front door would be opening and Stephen would walk into the kitchen with his briefcase and you’d look up, blinking, and realise it was five o’clock. The afternoons alone in the house with the baby pictures, making him live again in your head. Making him walk and talk for you. Laughing and clapping when he did something funny or great.

  It was worse for Stephen. He tried to cope more like a man. He kept working and tried to compartmentalise. Drink was involved for him right away. Not for you until later. You found the bottle of Whyte & Mackay in the boot of the car. The half-bottle in his briefcase. You blamed Stephen of course. The school fees argument replayed all the time in your head. If only. We should have. If and should and if and should on and on in a loop.

  And then that morning, the week before Easter 1984, the second Easter without Craig (he’d have been fifteen), when you woke early and Stephen wasn’t in bed. But that wasn’t so unusual because he w
as sleeping so little by that point. You went downstairs into the kitchen, where the kettle was still slightly warm but the tea was going cold in the pot, like he’d made it and forgotten about it. There was a stillness to the house, even though it was much too early for him to have left for work.

  Then you noticed the door that led through the utility room and out to the garage was open. Twelve footsteps – all it took for you to reach the garage door. You opened it and there he was, Stephen Docherty, your husband, twisting gently in a slow circle, his feet just a few inches off the ground, the little white stepladder on its side. The puddle of urine beneath him. He had no shoes on and he’d used a length of blue nylon clothes line, tied it around one of the beams. You didn’t cry right away, just stood there with your pupils widening and widening in the murky wooden light, listening to the gentle creak, creak, creak, the sound of rope against beam, reminding you of a hammock, of sailing ships. His face as purple as a raw heart, his mad tongue.

  You’d been married eighteen years.

  You thought you might be OK because Stephen had taken out fresh life insurance just before Craig died. You remembered that night – the insurance agent’s aftershave sweet and coconutty in the front room, Stephen bending over the papers, wearing his glasses as he signed with a flourish, as men often do. You didn’t know – why would you? – that suicide within two years of taking out the policy automatically invalidates it. If he had just stuck with the old policy everything would have been fine. This wasn’t even irony, just another scene in the horror film that your life had become. Your lawyers argued your case with the insurance company – the extreme stress and trauma you’d been through – and finally they relented and agreed to a compromise payment, issuing a cheque for £1,048.00. ‘Without prejudice.’ It didn’t even cover the lawyers’ and undertakers’ bills.

  You had to sell the home you loved so much.

  And that was how, in 1987, you found yourself turning forty alone in a two-bedroom council flat near the harbour. You discovered drink yourself then. Wine was the first thing. You found you could scrape through the day until around five o’clock before uncorking a bottle of sweet white wine. You’d never been much of a drinker and just two or three glasses of musky Riesling, or sugary Liebfraumilch, would make the shabby little flat seem warmer, homelier. The bottle would see you through until ten, when you fell asleep on the sofa, running eagerly into the dreams where Craig and Stephen were waiting for you, your arms flung wide and love pouring out of them like light. Then five o’clock became four o’clock. One bottle became two. Soon enough you were drinking from noon till bedtime. It was taking a bottle to have the effect a glass used to have.

  Such a revelation when you discovered spirits. That a half-glass of vodka had the same effect as half a bottle of wine! And in an instant! You felt like you’d split the atom. Found penicillin in the gunk at the bottom of the Petri dish. Pretty soon it was taking a bottle of Smirnoff to get you through the day. At your bedroom window you could just see the sea, the mouth of the river, before it snaked inland, where Craig’s body had been found. (‘Full fathom five thy son lies . . .’) You’d sit there for hours, sipping neat vodka, the fumes tearing your eyes, watching the sea, the drifting white cauliflower clouds against the grey sky, singing little songs to yourself. You found yourself sitting inside your wardrobe one morning, already drunk at ten o’clock, giggling with Craig’s red sweater draped over your face, inhaling him in your red tent, and you realised you were going mad, that you had gone mad, but there was a quiet detachment about it, the alcohol like a liquid pane of double-glazing, keeping you apart from the blue rage in your soul.

  30

  I CAME ROUND. I had no idea how long I’d been unconscious but she’d bandaged Walt’s hand in that time: a thick white dressing covering most of it, a dark patch of black blood visible where his pinkie used to be. She’d wiped up most of the blood. I started retching again, dry racking heaves. There was nothing left to come up.

  ‘Now, William,’ she said, moving in front of me. Walt’s head was lolling, I wasn’t sure if he was conscious or not. ‘What are we going to do with you? I’m still not sure that you’re telling me the whole truth. I thought you would have, given the display we’ve just had . . .’ She gestured to Walt with the knife, gouts of dried blood were caught between the serrated teeth. ‘In court you all blamed each other, didn’t you? No one ever came right out and said, “I did it.” The other two blamed you, didn’t they? And I always wondered about you. You always struck me as clever. Slippery.’

  ‘It was Banny.’

  ‘Hmmm. Maybe we can incentivise you further . . .’ She moved towards her bag and then stopped, her head tilting upwards, towards the wooden ceiling. It came again and I heard it too, a faint pinging, like a microwave.

  The doorbell.

  She turned and looked at me as it came again. She bent down, speaking right into my face as she tied the gag back into place. ‘If you’re thinking of doing anything stupid on the basis that it can’t get any worse for you . . .’ She stepped back and brought the knife up, pressing the tip against my nose. ‘Believe me it can. Do you understand me, William?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Good. And try not to be sick again while you’re gagged. Don’t want you dying on me.’

  She slipped the knife into its sheath and shoved it down the back of her jeans. She picked up a big, chromed revolver from one of the workbenches – Danko’s, or Hudson’s, I guessed – and stuck it down the front, covering it with the baggy sweater. Before she started up the stairs she checked her reflection in a small mirror hanging on the bare brick wall. She tutted and, with the air of a woman in evening dress fixing a stray hair before heading out to the opera, wiped a streak of Walt’s dried blood from her cheek. Her boots clattered up the wooden steps, a bar of light spilled briefly down the stairs, and she was gone.

  Walt’s mutilated right hand was still untied.

  31

  ‘MMMMFF!’ I STRAINED against the gag. ‘UNNNN!’ Slowly Walt looked up at me, confused, drugged-looking, in shock. His eyes were just . . . rinsed with tears, raw, terrified. I jerked my head, nodding frantically towards the table, begging him to follow me. Finally he turned and looked.

  The tiny silver scalpel, right there on the table, near the edge.

  ‘UNNNN!’ Please, Walt, understand. It was only a couple of feet away from his bandaged right hand. Upstairs I could hear her footsteps clacking away across wooden boards. I rocked my chair from side to side, managing to inch it a fraction closer to Walt’s, watching the baby monitor. ‘UNNNN!’ Finally he understood, his eyes going from mine to the scalpel. He reached out. As he did so a spasm of pain seemed to shoot through him and he cried out behind his gag. The bloodstain on the bandage seemed to spread, Walt crying, shaking his head. I looked him in the eye and tried to say everything with only my eyes – please, son, I know this hurts, but if we don’t get out of here, we will die.

  He tried again, his shoulders shaking as he cried, blood from his wound smearing across the wooden arm of the chair as his trembling fingertips inched closer to the silver blade. I could faintly hear voices from upstairs, from where she was talking to someone at the front door.

  Walt got the scalpel. He brought it back and held it upright in his bloody, trembling fist. I strained and pushed and pulled and rocked my chair from side to side, squeaking and jolting and moving it closer to Walt’s, my tethered left wrist now just inches from the blade. Sweat was pouring down my face, sweat and blood running salty into my eyes and my mouth. I kept glancing towards the baby monitor. How close could she be to the listening unit? Just an inch or two more . . .

  I felt a calf muscle strain and then tear as, with a loud squeak of wood against concrete, I managed to push my chair the final inch or two and the scalpel touched against the rope. Walt moved the blade back and forth and – thankfully – it was as sharp as it looked. The twine of the grey rope came apart instantly and in a couple of seconds my arm sprang free.
I grabbed the scalpel from Walt and started slashing at the ropes binding my ankles to the chair, my other arm, cutting myself a couple of times in the process, but frantic, beyond caring.

  I had Walt’s legs free and was sawing through the rope around his left arm when a single loud report cracked through the house above us, followed a half-second later by the bang of something heavy hitting the floor. I tore Walt out of the chair and pulled his gag off. ‘Daddy! My hand!’ I plastered my palm across his mouth and nodded towards the baby monitor. Carrying Walt I stumbled across the room to the tiny, shoulder-high casement window. Outside, snow was piled halfway up the pane; black night sky filled the other half, studded with slanting snow. I grabbed the handles and tried to force the window up but it wouldn’t budge an inch, jammed tight, maybe fifteen coats of paint, thirty-odd years’ worth, sealing it up. I heard her footsteps somewhere above us, getting louder, and I clutched the tiny scalpel in my fist, looking towards the steps. Then the footsteps receded again, growing fainter, and I heard a smooth, slithering sound – something heavy being dragged across wooden floorboards.

  I turned back to the window and jammed the scalpel into thick paint sealing up the bottom edge. I began drawing it across from left to right, working it into the cut I was making, pushing hard. Decades of gummy cream paint cracked and flaked off. Walt hugged into my leg, shaking, terrified. I had the scalpel a little over halfway across and could feel movement, some give in the left-hand side of the window, when there was a twanging CRACK! I looked down at the stump of the scalpel handle I was holding, the blade snapped off, lost inside the window. ‘Shit!’ I strained with both hands, trying to push it up, but the right-hand side was still gummed, stuck solid. I rammed my shoulder hard, one, two, three times against the frame. I looked at the baby monitor.