Saving Billie

by Peter Corris

  ‘Sammy,’ I said.

  ‘Right. She wants him back. I mean, there she is, hooking in Newcastle, using coke, probably up to here in debt and she wants her kid.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘Well, I thought about it for like, a tenth of a second. But then I thought back to all the crap we’d been through—you getting bashed and seeing two people get killed, and the threats to me and Sarah—and we still didn’t know what they all wanted from her.’

  I nodded. ‘Pissed me off for a while, but I’ve got used to untidy endings.’

  ‘I’m not. I sort of strung her along and asked her why she was so afraid of the cops. Remember that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She hemmed and hawed and didn’t want to tell me but I had her over a barrel, so she did. She killed Eddie.’

  ‘Jesus. Did she say how?’

  ‘She said she got him drunk and pushed him down some steps. She said he’d found out about Sammy and was calling her a mongrel bitch with a mongrel kid. She’d had enough and did for him. Didn’t mean to kill him, she said, but she reckoned crippled’d do.’

  ‘Rings true, doesn’t it? Eddie was a real piece of shit.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Sharon drank some more of the coffee, as bad as it was. I could see that she needed to go on and that she hadn’t got to the hardest part yet. I waited.

  ‘So I let her think that had got her some points and I asked her about what Eddie had told her about that guy who’d skipped. All the stuff you told me about—where he is and that.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘She laughed her head off. She said she didn’t know a fucking thing about it. Zip, zilch. Funniest fucking thing in the world. She let that Kramer woman think she knew something. Just big-noting herself, and hoping she might get something out of it in some way. That’s what started all this off and she didn’t give a stuff. She’s a moral zero, Cliff, my own sister.’

  There was nothing to say. I sat there and a silence seemed to fill the room, although the traffic noise from King Street must still have been coming through. But that’s the way it is in some moments, when the weight of what’s being said just kind of hits the mute button.

  Sharon sucked in a breath. ‘Know what I did? I’d prepared myself for this. I had a photo of Sammy, taken a fair while after Billie had last seen him. Since I’d found him the place where he’d be looked after. Here it is.’

  She reached into her pocket and pulled out a polaroid photo. It showed an adolescent boy, clearly the same person as in the earlier photograph I’d seen. He’d grown, gained confidence, and looked ready to take the next steps.

  I nodded and handed it back.

  ‘I was cruel,’ Sharon said. ‘I showed her the picture. She tried to snatch it from me. Screamed, tried to scratch. I held on to it and I decked her.’

  Sharon, crying now, quietly, not out of control, went on through her sobs: ‘She was on her knees, pleading . . .’

  ‘What did you say?’

  The sobs stopped and she lifted her head. ‘I said no.’