The Shining Girls A Novel

by Lauren Beukes

  Those are the ones she struggles with the most. Even the most hard-line Janes do. For sure. Wrap up your first fetus in an old T-shirt for a burial shroud and toss it in a dumpster three miles from the Place and see how you like it. No one said it would be pretty, yanking despair out of a woman.

  And then the man takes her by the arm. ‘Excuse me, ma’am. I think you dropped this,’ he says, offering her something in his hand. She has no idea how he caught up with them so suddenly. And she’s certain she knows that lopsided smile.

  ‘Margot?’ Jemmie is frightened.

  ‘You go along home, Jemmie,’ Margot says in her best, most authoritative school-marm voice, which is not particularly either, considering she’s only twenty-five. ‘I’ll be right behind you.’

  There shouldn’t be any complications now. But if she does have to go to hospital, the doctors won’t give her any trouble. Jane have started using Leunbach’s paste. No pain, no blood, no problems, no way of proving the miscarriage was induced. She’ll be just fine.

  She checks to make sure that Jemmie is moving away and turns to face him, pulling back her shoulders and straightening up so she can look him direct in the eye.

  ‘Can I help you, sir?’

  ‘I’ve been looking all over for you, sweetheart, I wanted to return this.’

  She finally looks at the object he’s shoving in her face. A protest button, home-made. She knows this because she drew it herself. A pig with wings. ‘Pigasus for President’ it reads in her block capitals, sloping up, unevenly to the right. The Yippies’ official candidate in ’68 because a pig could hardly be worse than the real politicians.

  ‘Do you recognize this? Can you tell me when you last saw it? Do you remember me? You must remember me.’ He asks it with terrible intensity.

  ‘Yes,’ she gasps. ‘The Democratic Convention.’ It comes rushing back like a slap. The scene outside the Hilton, because their leader, Tom Hayden, had told them to get the hell out of the park as the police started laying into people, pulling them down off the statues they’d climbed up.

  If they were going to be tear-gassed, the whole city would be teargassed, he was shouting. If blood was spilled in Grant Park, it would be spilled all over Chicago! Seven thousand people surging into the streets against the cops pushing back. Still angry about Martin Luther King, the whole of the West Side burning. The feeling of the concrete brick flying out of her hand like it was yanked on a string. She was aware of the cop barging into her, the baton glancing off her side, but she didn’t feel any pain until afterwards, in the shower when she saw the bruising.

  The news cameras and the lights on the steps of the hotel, chanting with the crowd at the top of her lungs, ‘The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching!’ until the cops sprayed the entire crowd with mace. Yippies. Bystanders. Reporters. Everybody. She thought she heard Rob croaking, ‘The pigs are whores,’ but she couldn’t find him in the crush of people crying and shoving, the spotlights glancing off the blue police helmets that were everywhere, batons slamming down mechanically.

  Margot was leaning on the hood of a car on Balboa, her head down, spitting up saliva and rubbing her eyes with the hem of her T-shirt, which only made it worse. Something made her look up to see him, limping straight towards her, a tall man full of such ferocious intent. Like a brick on a string.

  He stopped in front of her and gave her a skew smile. Inoffensive. Charming even. It was so out of place in this chaos that she moaned and tried to shove him away, suddenly terrified the way she hadn’t been of the cops or the crowd or the burning that had threatened to collapse her chest.

  He caught her wrists. ‘We’ve met before. But you won’t remember.’ Such a weird thing to say, it stuck with her.

  ‘Here,’ he grabbed hold of her lapel, as if to pull her to her feet, but instead he yanked off her button. ‘This is it.’ He let go so abruptly that she fell onto the car, sobbing in outrage and shock.

  She staggered home, looking forward to showering for an hour before sinking onto the couch and smoking a jay to calm down. But when she unlocked the door and pushed past the beaded curtain, it was to find Rob in the middle of fucking some girl in their bed. ‘Oh hey, baby, this is Glenda,’ he said, not even pausing mid-thrust. ‘Want to join us?’ She used her lipstick to write ‘asshole’ on the mirror, pressing down so hard that she broke it in half.

  They fought for five and a half hours after Glenda finally got the hint and took off. Made up. Had make-up sex that didn’t turn out so well. (Turned out Glenda had crabs.) Broke up a week later. And then Rob slunk off to Toronto to avoid being drafted and she finished college and got into teaching because they hadn’t managed to change the world, and she was disillusioned. Until she found Jane.

  And the thing with the scary limping guy who so admired her button that he stole it in the middle of a riot became a funny anecdote she could break out at dinner parties or meetings, but then she got better stories, ones that actually went somewhere. She hadn’t thought about any of that for ages. Until now.

  He takes advantage of her shock. Slings his arm around her, pulling her close and slides the knife into her stomach. Right there, in the middle of the street in the rain. She can’t believe it. She opens her mouth to scream, but only manages to gag as he twists the knife. A cab drives past, the light on, water spraying up from the tires, splashing against Margot’s red pants, even as the blood starts welling up over her waistband, soaking into the ridges of corduroy, obscenely warm. She looks for Jemmie, but she’s already disappeared round the corner. Safe.

  ‘Tell me the future,’ he whispers, his breath warm against her ear. ‘Don’t make me read it in your entrails.’

  ‘Screw you,’ she gasps, less strident than she imagined it in her head, and she tries to push him away. But all the strength has gone out of her arms and he has learned. Worse. He knows he is invincible. ‘Have it your way,’ he shrugs, still smiling. He wrenches her thumb backwards – it’s unbearable – and uses it to shepherd her away to a construction site.

  He pushes her down into the mud of the foundation pit and binds her up with wire and gags her and takes his time with the killing. When he is done, he tosses the tennis ball in after her.

  He doesn’t intend that she shouldn’t be found. But the man operating the digger pushing the rubble into the pit next morning catches only a glimpse of reddish-blonde hair in the mud and manages to convince himself that it’s a dead cat, even though he sometimes lies awake at night and thinks it wasn’t.

  Her murderer takes the object he needs and then tosses her purse into an empty lot. The contents are picked over by various petty opportunists until a good citizen turns in the bag at the police station. But by that time all the useful stuff is gone. The cops can’t identify someone from the cassette recordings she made. Copies of the music playing on Big Jane’s player in that Hyde Park apartment, crackly and low-fi from the jerry-rigged connection of tapedeck to LP. The Mamas and Papas, Dusty Springfield, the Lovin’ Spoonful, Peter, Paul & Mary, Janis Joplin.

  Jemmie goes to bed early the night of her illegal abortion, complaining about something nasty she ate. Her parents don’t question her, never find out the truth. Her guy does not come back from Vietnam, or maybe he does, but not to her. She gets good grades in school, goes to community college, but drops out to get married at twenty-one. She has three children, no complications. Goes back to school at thirty-four and ends up working for City Parks.

  The women of Jane worry themselves sick, but there is nothing to show that Margot didn’t just get tired and pack it all in, maybe to join that ex-boyfriend in Canada. And besides, they’re preoccupied with their own troubles. A year later, Jane is raided. Eight women are arrested. Their lawyer keeps delaying the case for months and months, awaiting the outcome of a big trial that she says will change women’s rights to be in control of their own bodies, forever.

  Kirby

  19 NOVEMBER 1992

  Division 1 is the oldest part of the Cook
County correctional facility, which is currently expanding with two new buildings to house the overflow of prisoners. Al Capone enjoyed a stay at the county’s expense here back when there was direct access from the street. Now maximum security means that it’s barricaded behind three layers of fences; you have to pass through one gate at a time, twirls of barbed wire double-stacked on top. The grass between the fences is patchy and yellow. The facade with its gothic lettering and lion heads and narrow rows of windows is dingy and discolored.

  The historic building hasn’t been afforded the same care and attention as the Field Museum or the Art Institute, although the prison has similar rules for visitors. No eating, no touching.

  Kirby wasn’t counting on having to take off her boots to go through the X-ray machine. It takes her five minutes on either side to undo them and lace them up again afterwards.

  She is more freaked out than she wants to admit. It’s culture shock. Because it’s just like the movies, only tenser and smellier. There’s a fug of sweat and anger in here, and the dull noise of too many people cooped up together diffusing through the thick walls. The paint on the security gate is scuffed and scratched, especially around the lock, which makes a heavy kerlunk as the guard opens it to let her through.

  Jamel Pelletier is already waiting for her at one of the tables in the visitors’ room. He looks worse than the photographs of him in the Sun-Times clips Chet pulled for her. The cornrows are gone and his hair is short and neat, but his skin is greasy. He has a scattering of fine pimples across his forehead above wide eyes with thick lashes and scruffy eyebrows which make him look painfully young, even if he’s in his mid-twenties now. Older than her. The tan prison uniform hangs on him like a sack, the number printed in bold letters down his chest. It’s an automatic civility, moving to shake his hand, but he scrunches up his face with an amused huff and shakes his head.

  ‘Crap. Already I’m breaking the rules,’ she says. ‘Thanks for meeting with me.’

  ‘You look different than I thought,’ he says. ‘You bring any chocolate?’ His voice has a husky rasp. She guesses hanging yourself from the bars by your own pants and crushing your larynx will do that to you. The thought of another eight years in here would make that a conceivable option.

  ‘Sorry. I should have thought of that.’

  ‘You gon’ help me?’

  ‘I’m gonna try.’

  ‘My lawyer said I shouldn’t talk to you. She’s plenty mad.’

  ‘Because I lied to her?’

  ‘Yeah. Those people do that professionally. You don’t try to out-bullshit a lawyer, man.’

  ‘It seemed like the best way to find out about the case. I’m sorry.’

  ‘You sorted it out with her?’

  ‘I’ve left messages.’ Kirby sighs.

  ‘Well, if it’s not okay with her, then it’s not with me neither,’ he says, getting up to go. He jerks his head at the guard, who looks annoyed, and starts to move toward him, reaching for the handcuffs at his belt.

  ‘Wait. Don’t you want to hear me out?’

  ‘Your letter spelled it out pretty clear. You think it was some psycho killer did the same to you.’ But he hesitates all the same.

  ‘Pelletier,’ the guard barks. ‘You coming or going?’

  ‘Staying for a bit. Sorry, Mo. You know what bitches are like.’ He gives her a smug leer.

  ‘Not cool,’ Kirby says, keeping her voice level.

  ‘I give a fuck,’ he snarls. But he momentarily drops his front. Still young, still scared as hell, Kirby thinks. She has that T-shirt.

  ‘Did you do it?’

  ‘You serious? Anyone in here going to say different if you ask them that? I tell you what. You figure out what you’re gonna do for me and I’ll help you.’

  ‘I’ll do a story on you.’

  He stares at her and then breaks into a grin so wide it could swallow you up. ‘Shit. You for real? You already tried that one.’

  ‘You play sports? I’ll cover it.’ That would be a great piece, actually. Prison basketball. Harrison might even go for it.

  ‘Nah. I do weights.’

  ‘All right. A profile interview on you. Your side of the story. Maybe for a magazine.’ She doesn’t know how much currency he’ll put in Screamin’, but she’s desperate.

  ‘Huh,’ he says, like he’s still not buying it. But Kirby knows the truth is everybody wants someone to hear them out. ‘What you want to know?’

  ‘Where were you at the time of the murder?’

  ‘With Shante. Banging that fine girl’s ass up against the wall.’ He flaps his hand so that his fingers make a sloppy smacking sex sound against his palm. It sounds uncannily like the real thing. ‘You know it, baby.’

  ‘I can just as easily leave.’

  ‘Ooooh. Did I offend you?’

  ‘It offends me when psychos get away with slashing up girls, jerkwad. I’m trying to find the killer. Do you want to help me or not?’

  ‘Relax, girl. I’m messing with you. I was with Shante, but she didn’t want to testify ’cos she on parole and hanging with my ass is a violation ’cos of my priors, right? Better I go to jail than the mother of my child. We didn’t think it was gonna stick anyhow. The charges were bullshit.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Stolen car, sure. Rest of it? Nah.’

  ‘But you were riding around the same day Julia was killed. Did you see anyone?’

  ‘You gonna have to be more explicit. We saw a lot of people. Lot of people saw us was the problem. Should have stayed by the lakefront, no one woulda thought nothing of it. But we had to go north up Sheridan.’ He thinks about it. ‘We did stop for a piss near the woods. Probably right round there. Saw a guy. Acting funny.’

  Kirby’s stomach flips. ‘Did he have a limp?’

  ‘Sure,’ Jamel says, rubbing at the cracked skin on his lips. ‘Sure. Yeah.

  I remember that. He had a limp. That guy was a limping motherfucker.

  Kinda twitchy too. Kept looking all round.’

  ‘How close were you?’ Her chest is tight. Finally. Fucking finally.

  ‘Close enough. Across the road. I guess we didn’t think much of it at the time. But he was limping. You could see that.’

  ‘What was he wearing?’ she says, suddenly careful. You can want something to be true …

  ‘One of those black puffy jackets and jeans. I remember because it was hot and it seemed odd. Guess he musta been wearing it to hide the blood – am I right?’

  ‘Black guy? Really dark?’ Also known as leading the witness.

  ‘As night.’

  ‘You asshole.’ she says, furious with him. And herself for spoon-feeding him everything she wanted to hear. ‘You’re making this up.’

  ‘You like it,’ he shoots back. ‘You think if I’d seen some suspicious motherfucker I wouldn’t have told the polis?’

  ‘Maybe they wouldn’t have believed you. They already had you wrapped up for it.’

  ‘You’re the one doing the wrapping. Hey, you know, maybe you can do a story on me.’

  ‘That’s not on the table any more.’

  ‘Shit. You tell a bitch what she wants to hear and she gets all up in your face. You know what I really want?’ He leans forward and makes a little grabbing motion with his hand to get her to come closer so they won’t be overheard. After a second’s hesitation she does, even though she knows he’s going to come out with some disgusting proposition. He gets his mouth right up against her ear. ‘You take care of my baby. Lily. She’s eight years old now, going on nine. Got diabetes. You get her medicine and make sure her momma doesn’t sell it for crack.’

  ‘I—’ Kirby rocks back as Jamel starts laughing.

  ‘You like that? We got a sob story going or what? You can do some of them heartbreak photos with my shorty with her fingers through the fence. Maybe one tear rolling down her chubby little cheek, her hair all done up in pigtails. All those different-colored hairbands. Get a petition going. Protestors outsid
e the prison with them signs and everything. Get me an appeal in no time, right?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Kirby says. She is so unprepared for his animosity, for the miserable fucked-upness of this place.

  ‘You’re sorry,’ he says flatly.

  She pushes away from the table, taking the guard unawares. ‘You still got eight minutes,’ he says, glancing at the clock.

  ‘I’m done. I’m sorry. I have to go.’ She shoulders her bag and the guard unlocks the door and jerks down the handle to let her out.

  ‘Sorry don’t mean shit!’ Jamel calls after her. ‘Bring me chocolate next time you come. Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups! And a pardon! You hear?’

  Harper

  16 AUGUST 1932

  Heavy tree-fern fronds curl over on either side of the florist’s window in the Congress Hotel, like curtains on a stage. It makes the transaction a performance for the people passing through the foyer. He feels exposed. It’s too hot. The smell of the flowers is too sweet. It crawls behind his eyeballs, heavy and stuffy. All of it makes him want to get out of here as quickly as he’s able.

  But the fat fairy in the apron insists on showing him all the possibilities, segregated by color and variety. Carnations for gratitude, roses for romance, daisies for friendship or loyal love. The man’s rolled-up sleeves expose dark bristling curls like pubic hair that creep over his wrists halfway to his knuckles.

  It’s impetuous. A risk when he’s been so careful with everything else. He has waited four months so as not to raise suspicion, nor appear too eager.

  There’s no light in her. Not like his girls. And yet she’s more than the low dullards that trudge through the days, interchangeable in any of the Chicagos if you only look past their clothes. He likes her callow viciousness. He likes the sense that he is defying something.

  Harper ignores the sprays of pale pinks and yellows and fingers the petal of a lily, splayed open obscenely. At his touch, the stamen drips powdery gold over the black and white tiles.