Thorn in the Flesh

by Anne Brooke

  ‘Got any food, missus?’ This from a voice in the corner, young, female again, but this time with a northern accent.

  When Kate looked in the direction of the voice, she could see a hand reach out from the smother of blankets the girl was dressed in. She took something from next to the fire, a cup, raised it to her mouth and drank down the contents.

  ‘It’ll go with our drink, see?’ the girl said. ‘Whadd’ya got?’

  ‘No food,’ Kate replied. ‘But I’ve got money if you’ll help me.’

  As she said the words, she shivered. Perhaps she shouldn’t have admitted she’d come prepared, at least financially? With Barney and Izzy, it hadn’t seemed so frightening, but what if these people turned on her, robbed her or worse? She had no defences, and nobody knew she was here. Not even Nicky. She was alone.

  In spite of her fears, nobody made a move to attack or stand against her. The fire went on flickering and from further away, the other side of one of the fountains, Kate heard the murmur of talking and the odd laugh, quickly stifled. Where was the old man? And what would he be able to tell her? Around her, a couple of conversations started up and she was about to move away, thinking that so far no-one here had given her anything of use, when the young girl spoke again.

  ‘Okay. Whadd’ya want then? And how much have you got for it?’

  Beneath her coat, Kate felt her shoulder muscles relax. ‘For the information I want, I’ll give you fifty pounds.’

  All slight conversations stopped, but she hadn’t finished yet. ‘And for more, I’ll double it.’

  There. That was it. Her one great throw of the dice. Gone. And if it didn’t bring her what she wanted here, then she’d throw it again and again until it did. Let them do what they liked to her; it could never be more than what she’d already had to endure.

  Someone coughed. The girl laughed.

  ‘Go on then,’ she said.

  ‘I’m looking for Song,’ Kate said and was at once aware of a sudden stillness that had fallen on the group. A stillness created not from any lack of noise, but from something else: an internal shift. ‘More than that, earlier on, someone else – an old man, one of … one of you, I think – told me he might have something to give me. A letter from Song perhaps? I don’t know, but if it is I want to read it.’

  From beyond the fire, two figures pushed themselves up and began to walk towards Kate. She tried to seek their eyes, see if she could recognise either of them, but the hoods and old scarves they were wearing made it impossible. When they came to where she stood, they didn’t stop but pushed past her, almost causing her to fall. One of them however turned again, his hood falling from his face and it was then that she recognised the man who’d asked to meet her here. The smell of dust and sweat flowed over her.

  ‘Wait!’ she cried out. ‘I’m here. You said you had something for me. You said …’

  As she spoke, Kate tried to grab the old man, but he muttered something and flinched away. His companion stepped round him towards her and a second later she was staggering into the gutter, the punch in her stomach winding her and sending a wave of nausea flooding into her throat. She gagged and tried to catch her breath again.

  When she looked up, the two men were gone, vanished into a faceless stream of people. She’d failed. She’d come to see the old man from the centre and she’d failed. He’d told her nothing. What had she done wrong? How could she have acted any differently? Glancing around, she saw nobody else had moved, though to her unpractised eye they might have been huddling closer together within the circle. Something was missing though, something …

  ‘You should keep on your guard more, missus. See what happens when you don’t.’

  The unexpected voice made Kate almost cry out, but she bit her lips shut. Her body ached. Cold fingers were touching her neck and too-sweet breath drifted across her cheek. She turned round, heart racing once more.

  It was the girl. Close to, she wasn’t as young as Kate had thought. Her skin was lined like mesh and her eyes glittered cold in the lamplight. The few strands of hair slipping out from beneath her hood were lank and clung to her face. She spoke again, her voice low but with a timbre of lost youth and wariness.

  ‘You should be more careful. Anyone could have jumped you, especially if you’re going to mention money. You got what you deserved and lucky it was no worse. Stupid, weren’t you?’

  Kate said nothing. She just continued to stare into the woman’s unfathomable eyes. It was as if this place of lost people and lost dreams no longer existed and the only two people in the world were this stranger and herself.

  ‘Stupid, eh?’

  ‘Stupid enough to want to find out more,’ Kate said.

  The woman laughed, and again that decay-sweet breath swept over Kate’s senses. ‘You wouldn’t be so uppity if you knew what you were saying, but you don’t, do you? Song? The Song Man? Always humming, he was. Used to be good to hear, but not any more. Not lately. Don’t ask me why though. All I know is we don’t like the sound of singing no more.’

  ‘You know him then?’

  ‘I didn’t say that,’ the woman stopped laughing and peered forward at Kate as if seeing her for the first time.

  ‘You didn’t deny it either,’ Kate whispered. ‘Do you think I don’t know what I’m asking? You’re wrong. I do. More than you know. Because of who and what I am, I’m here now, asking you if you know what the old man might have wanted to give me. Or where to find Song. Do you know where to find him?’

  For a moment, the woman was as still as a snake, one who knew how to strike. Then something in her eyes changed and she nodded. ‘S’pose I might do, mightn’t I?’

  Another wave of sickness passed over Kate, but she shook it away. The night felt unreal, heavy with the slick of too many questions.

  ‘Good. Will you tell me where that is? I won’t ask you to take me there.’

  ‘No point if you did. I’d be a fool to do that.’

  ‘Please,’ Kate reached out and put her hand on the woman’s arm. She felt so thin that Kate’s fingers could once again have circled round skin and bone and touched each end to end. ‘Please help me.’

  The woman wrenched herself away from Kate’s grasp. ‘No. No-one touches me. No-one.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘’S’okay. You’re crazy. I didn’t say I wouldn’t help you, did I? I won’t take someone like you anywhere near someone like Song. Wouldn’t go there myself now, would I? And I shouldn’t tell you neither. But I know from that crazy old man what he had to give you. A letter. I took it, thought it might be worth something. I’ll give it to you now but you’ll have to pay.’

  Kate nodded.

  Without a word and keeping her eyes fixed on the woman’s face, its contours shifting in the shadow and brightness of the nearby flame, Kate opened the envelope stuffed full with money. She peeled off several notes and watched as the woman brought the cash up to her face and sniffed it as if it were an exotic perfume.

  ‘Nice,’ she giggled. ‘Nice. Maybe I’ll give some to the old man too, I don’t know. You’ll be wanting this letter then?’

  Again Kate nodded and reached out. The woman laughed and took out from beneath her coat a small, plastic bag. Kate snatched it from her and tore it open.

  Her fingers closed round a crumple of brown envelope. In it a sheet of dirty white paper. On it only seven words. None of them enough.

  What happens now is all your fault, it said.

  Chapter Twenty

  When Kate woke up the next morning, she could hear rain. A summer shower. Her pillow smelt of the lavender oil she’d sprinkled on it last night, and which hadn’t resulted in the effect she’d wanted. She remembered seeing 2am but after that she must have slept. Not long enough though. Her eyes felt hot and crinkled and she had the beginnings of a headache that threatened to worsen.

  Splashing her face in the basin, she glanced up at her reflection in the mirror. Her complexion was lined and pale, with dark rings round
her eyes. Running her hands through her hair, trying to dampen down the morning frizz, the strands felt dry against her fingers. She no longer looked like who she was supposed to be. Or who she thought she was.

  A hot bath stopped the involuntary shivers riding through her body and afterwards she layered ginger body cream over her skin. It was late, almost 10am by the time she was dressed and downstairs. She made coffee. She couldn’t face eating so soon, not after so little sleep. The note from yesterday lay on the kitchen table where she’d left it, saying so little and meaning, somehow, so much that she didn’t understand.

  The house felt too quiet.

  Although it wasn’t her custom, she turned on the radio to fill the silence. In half an hour or so, she thought, she’d ring Nicky.

  She didn’t.

  Because what she heard on the radio swept all thoughts of the day’s plans and hopes out of her mind. A bomb. London. The Underground. Dead and injured people. Chaos.

  She couldn’t believe it. She turned the radio up and sat at the table, fingers clutching her untouched coffee. Yesterday – she’d been there yesterday, and now this terrible thing had happened. It didn’t seem real.

  It didn’t seem – God help her – anything that would happen here, not now that the IRA threats were so much a thing of the past. But it had. Al-Qaeda. It must be their work.

  Blinking back tears, she sprang to her feet and headed for the living room. The television would have more news. She would see for herself how bad it might be. She watched, almost unable to take in the harsh reality paraded across the screen. Explosions on the underground and on a bus. Devastating human tragedies all around her, other people’s lives cut off or damaged. Please God let there be no more of it, she prayed, although she had no reason to believe any of her prayers would be answered. All the while she was thinking, who do I know in London? Who might be harmed by this? She could think of only two people.

  Peter, of course. And her missing son. One she hoped was alive, the other dead.

  No, stop it. She must stop it. At the moment, she had no way of finding out in either case. She couldn’t call anyone about Stephen, and it was impossible to call Peter’s number now. What would his wife and family think? She would have to hope, pray and try later. They, not she, would have the first right to concern and action. So she simply continued watching the pictures of carnage drifting across the screen and listening to the expressions of shock and concern. The streets of the city were eerily empty in some areas, and a mass of emergency vehicles and people in others. The reporters gave out the same news over and over again, with little else known. For a reason she couldn’t pinpoint, Kate found the explosion on the bus to be the most shocking of all, perhaps because it had been there, out on the street, rather than contained underground – although that, she knew, was no containment and far worse for the people trapped or dying there. At least, there had been doctors nearby, to help where help was needed. After the bus, she wondered if there would be more bombs, more needless destruction, but there was nothing.

  She kept switching the television off and on again, in case she’d missed something else. It reminded her of September 11th, although of course that disaster had been many times more terrible. However, the same sense of helplessness and the secret guilt of voyeurism remained. It was these feelings more than any others which eventually drove her away, back into the kitchen, the radio now silent. Once there, she washed up, tidied the cupboards, threw away the fruit in the fruit bowl which was now past its best and wiped over the surfaces again.

  At noon, she rang Nicky. There was no response and she didn’t want to leave a message. She had so much she wanted to say about yesterday and also today which would be unthinkable left on an ansaphone. An hour later, however, and the need to talk to someone – anyone – was overwhelming. Her skin pricked with loneliness. So, voice trembling, she dialled her friend’s number again and left a brief message.

  ‘Hello? Nicky, it’s Kate here. I hope you’re all right. Terrible news about today. We live in a frightening world, I think. I’d love a chance to speak to you later, if that’s possible. Please give my love to David and the twins. I’ll speak to you soon, I hope.’

  Replacing the receiver, she closed her eyes and leant for a moment against the wall, which felt cold against her forehead. So much was happening, both in her own world and beyond. The attack on herself, her meeting with Peter, the frustrating and unsuccessful search for her son, the threatening letters and what they meant to her, then today’s terrorist attack. She wondered if anything would ever be the same again.

  Another thought struck her. Yesterday’s letter and Stephen’s threat. Perhaps he meant more than her by his words: What happens now is all your fault. Did he mean this? The bombs? No. No, it wasn’t possible. His anger was focused purely on herself, his rage targeted only in one direction. She’d always seen that. What had happened today had been a coincidence. A bitter one, for sure, but still only a coincidence. She mustn’t be foolish.

  Time crawled by. It felt again as if she were waiting for something, but didn’t know what. She tried not to watch the television, as the news was always the same, always horrific. But it was almost impossible and, more times than she liked to remember, she found herself sitting in front of the screen, watching the strangeness of the day with her arms wrapped around her knees as she perched on the edge of her seat. The shock of it drove the thoughts of her own life out of her head. So many lives changed and for nothing. Nothing good would come of this. Such acts of violence were the way of the world and the society in which she lived now. Hadn’t she experienced it herself? On a far smaller scale. And so little could be accomplished to halt the flow down to the depths of whatever was to come.

  Tomorrow, she thought, tomorrow she would again take up the reins of her search for Stephen. Her attacker, her rapist. Her son. The knowledge of incest lay like a ticking explosive at the corner of her heart but she did not have the strength to search into any of it yet. She would try tomorrow to discover the truth, whether her suspicions were right or wrong, and perhaps then she could at last move on, explore what her life should be in the future. She would do her best; there was nothing else she could do. But for today, she was constrained to stop with the world and watch with their mourning.

  Turning the television off at last, she read a little and ate a hastily-made sandwich before falling asleep on the sofa in the afternoon. Her dreams were fluid and bright at first, in spite of the day and her own recent history. Gradually however that changed and the images slipping through her consciousness became faintly menacing, but not terrifying enough to be able to wake up. She was walking, again, in a forest and her feet were scrunching through grasses and ferns. Above her, twisted branches, leaves and the distant sky. As she walked, she could see a light in front of her, tunnelling its way through the dense woods. The air felt heavy, as if it was pushing her forward or as if something behind her was drawing closer. She began to walk faster but came no nearer to whatever lay ahead on her path. She tried to glance back but nobody was there, although the trees had darkened with no sign of sky above them.

  In her dream, she began to run.

  The sound of her breathing grew louder and she could feel the rapid beat of her heart, the constriction in her throat. Must escape, she must escape whatever was pursuing her, even though she had no idea what she was running towards. Keep going. Don’t look back.

  From nowhere the roar of the wind and a feeling of being so cold. Cold and afraid. She began to run faster, the sense of whatever danger lurked sweeping like snow over her skin, hands torn by trees and the whisper of the grasses trailing over her legs, slowing her down. Must escape. But she couldn’t escape. Whatever was after her would win, and she would be swallowed up by it. She would scream, but nobody would hear, nobody would come. Just like before. And no-one would ever know. It was here, now. Now. It was here and she couldn’t run any more. She couldn’t …

  Crying out, Kate shuddered herself awake, skin c
lammy with sweat and shivering. For a moment she couldn’t understand where she was and why she’d been asleep. Then the memory crept back, like a shadow fleeing the sun. The day. The London bombs. Her living room. The television. Everything was familiar. The only one out of place was herself.

  Struggling to her feet and trying to wipe the stickiness out of her eyes, she shivered again. Although it wasn’t cold, a draught was coming from somewhere, but she couldn’t tell where. Was it the window? Had she left it open? No, it was closed and the garden beyond appeared calm and elegant in the late afternoon sun. Blinking and still trying to place herself in the day she’d drifted away from in sleep, she stepped into the hallway. The unexpected glimmer of light to the left drew her eye at once.

  The front door was half-open. Through it, the summer breeze swirled in.

  Everything became still and at the same time, the noise in Kate’s ears hummed louder, cutting out all thought.

  The door was open. Someone was inside the house. Who? Her attacker? No, it couldn’t be, or he’d have trapped her in the living room, where she’d only now been asleep and an open victim to any evil thing. And then … and then … No. Don’t think it. Don’t tread that path. Along it lay danger.

  She was so sure she’d locked up safely, secured herself inside. Throat dry and heart pounding, Kate took the three steps down the hallway towards the gaping door. The lock was splintered, tiny daggers of wood stretching upwards like thin fingers grasping the air. The splinters grazed her skin. She flung the door wide so it collided against the plaster of the wall with a dull thud. She ran out.

  In the garden, everything was as it should be. In the road, nobody was about, not even any odd cars passing. She swung wildly from side to side, trying to catch any sudden movements at the corner of her vision, but could still see no-one. Running now, she slipped to the side of the house and glanced over the back garden, whilst at the same time trying to keep a watching brief on the front door. She couldn’t countenance shutting it and trapping whatever might be inside.