by Finn Bell
THE EASTER
MAKE BELIEVERS
BY
FINN BELL
Copyright © 2017 Finn Bell
Kindle Edition
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Page
Books by Finn Bell
Editor’s Note
Before
Tobe and Nick
The Two Men in the Dark
The Storm
Tobe and Nick
The Two Men in the Dark
The Storm
Tobe and Nick
The Two Men in the Dark
The Storm
Tobe and Nick
The Two Men in the Dark
The Storm
Tobe and Nick
The Two Men in the Dark
The Storm
Tobe and Nick
The Two Men in the Dark
The Storm
Tobe and Nick
The Two Men in the Dark
Tobe and Nick
The Four Men in the Dark
The Four Men in the Dark
The Four Men in the Dark
The Four Men in the Dark
Becca Partick and The Channel 3 News
Slightly Biased Mostly True Things
BOOKS BY FINN BELL
DEAD LEMONS
PANCAKE MONEY
THE EASTER MAKE BELIEVERS
A PEARL FOR EVERY CHILD
For more visit:
www.finnbellbooks.com
EDITOR’S NOTE
This text has been edited and proofed by qualified professionals for publication in the international market. It is intended for use in an eBook version as well as a print book version of the text with the aim of delivering a reading experience that is both grammatically and stylistically accessible to readers from diverse English language conventions including the United States of America, Canada, The United Kingdom, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. For this reason the text intentionally employs British English with American Punctuation and, where deemed appropriate, adheres to the Chicago Manual of Style (16th Edition). Exceptions to the aforementioned approach, including the use of spelling, style and grammar conventions in aid of specific narrative and artistic devices, are intentional.
BEFORE . . .
I met my father for the first and only time by accident.
I was 19 and stumbling drunk out the back door of a club and there he was. After all that time. After everything that happened. Just standing there. Less than a pace away from me, smoking. Laughing with a girl who looked about my age. It was him, I was sure. I didn’t even need the worn picture in my wallet. The one my mother didn’t know I found. Because his face looked just like mine. Older, skinnier, deeper rings under the eyes, but still my face.
He looked straight at me and our eyes met. I know he recognised me.
I know he did. Had to have seen what I saw. There was a moment where the smile stalled on his face and then he turned away, made to leave.
I don’t know why I did it, even now. I didn’t plan it, didn’t want it. I remember yelling but I don’t know what I said. I grabbed his arm but the moment I touched him he immediately pushed me back hard, like he was expecting it. That’s when I got angry, not about the shove but because he knew it was coming. He did it without breaking his stride, without even turning his face back, not looking at me.
I hit him from behind. Then I was on top of him. Sitting wide legged across his chest. My fists warm and wet with each impact. His face looked less and less like mine. There was a feeling to it. Something I’d never known before. Meaning to the experience. I was too drunk and young and stupid to know the right words for it then but I realised it later. It was intimacy.
The whole world was still there, the dirty back alley, the screaming, clawing girl, his flailing arms, but none of it mattered. None of it really existing. My world was that timeless, silent, perfectly red space between our faces.
I stopped hitting him when he stopped trying to defend himself. The girl had run off by then.
“Why?” I asked, my breathing ragged as I gripped him around the throat, his hot skin slick with blood and sweat. The moment I heard my own voice I realised I’d said it before. Had been yelling it.
He looked up at me then. He didn’t seem scared. It wasn’t an excuse, just an answer. I can still hear him, the level, almost bored sounding voice, still see the calm, unfeeling stare.
“Look, I don’t love you. I didn’t love your mother. We fucked a few times and then I left. I didn’t mean to hurt her or you. There’s no reason. It doesn’t mean anything. Things just happened that way. It’s just the way it is.”
I left him lying there as I walked into the night. I had to.
I was scared, not of getting caught but of what I might do to him if I stayed. I’d never felt like this before, never hit anyone.
That’s when it started, right there, as I was walking away. That was the first time my hands started trembling. Shaking no matter what I do.
So now there’s this thing I do sometimes, maybe everybody does, I don’t know.
Whenever things go wrong or I get to thinking about the past too much my hands start shaking. Sometimes they even start for no reason. Nothing too bad, I can still do things normally, but the tremble is visible. Something I have to hide. It always goes away again, but when it wants to, not when I do. During the day I can usually keep busy and ignore it but at night, when it’s just me and I’ve got nothing to distract me, it sometimes gets bad.
I went to a doctor once and she said there’s nothing wrong with them, no nerve damage or anything like that. She said I should maybe talk to someone about it, nothing she could do but give me pills if I wanted them. I didn’t.
Then I found the thing I do, by accident. I was drunk and tired and alone and it just happened.
When the shaking starts I think back to the past and imagine I could magically go back in time to some point when I was younger, but still knowing what I know now. Knowing what was going to happen, the older me inside my younger self. A chance to do things again, to do the right things. Then I imagine how everything could have turned out, how my life would be now, how different I would feel if that’s what happened instead of what did. And my hands stop shaking.
It still works, even now, every time. But it’s getting harder. The problem is the more I do it, the further I have to imagine going back in my own life to fix things. Like every unmade mistake reveals the one beneath it. First it was simple, you’re an adult, don’t choose this, choose that instead. Then you’re a teenager, do this, don’t make that mistake, and then you’re a kid. And the further back you go the harder it becomes to find the things you should have done differently to make things better. But they must be there, the things I did. They must be.
* * *
TOBE AND NICK
“These men will make a desert and call it peace”
—Chief Calgacus (who fought the Roman Army, Scotland, AD 83).
Tobe has a habit of picking up threads of conversation out of nowhere. Things we were discussing yesterday, a month ago. Doesn’t matter. No preamble or warning, just starts up where he left off. Like he’s been keeping up both sides of the argument inside himself.
“Inherent fidelity,” Tobe declares out of the blue.
“What?” I ask, looking up fro
m my desk to see him standing behind my chair, gazing out the window as I lower my trembling hands under the desk to still them by gripping my knees. I didn’t know he was there. Tobe also has a habit of moving silently.
“Inherent fidelity,” Tobe repeats, pausing to give me a look before continuing. “Ghandi said when you’re born and if your parents really love you then that love will imbue you with what he called inherent fidelity. He believed that this was a rare thing. He said their love goes into you, changes you, a pure thing that fundamentally makes you different from other people. You would have a kind of hope and strength built into every part of who you are, going to the core of you. Like a compass needle you would almost always naturally be drawn towards goodness and happiness. No matter what happens to you after.”
“Ghandi? Indian philosopher guy, really aggressive about being a pacifist?” I ask, eliciting an absent nod from Tobe.
“So, your parents really loving you turns you into a good person?” I continue, wondering where this is going.
“This is what Ghandi believed, but only to explain the world. See, Ghandi said that’s why the world is the way it is. All the suffering and strife, all the wrongness. It’s because most people are too weak. Ghandi said that without the inherent fidelity that love gives you, you’ll always be lacking. For you, strength and hope will be hard work, too hard, because you’re simply not made for it. For you, goodness and happiness will be unnatural. You’ll still want it, need it, but it won’t be built in to who you are. You’ll try to get it but mostly you’ll fail. So you’ll try to find it in other ways. Bad ways. That’s why the world is the world,” Tobe states.
“Why are you telling me this?” I ask.
Tobe looks back out at the rain before he answers. “Because there’s a problem with inherent fidelity. The way Ghandi said it you either have it or you don’t. And most don’t. I get that. The question is how do we know? If there really is such a thing, can we feel the difference, know it inside us somehow? Can we sense it there, or sense the empty space where it’s not? And more importantly, could we tell from the outside whether someone has it?
“Think of the things we’ve seen. I’ve been doing this for more than 40 years. Most of the people we catch don’t change. Years of wrongness. Many of them I’ve seen go from young to old. They only ever get worse. They forge a lifetime of tragedy chasing a taste of peace not meant for them. There’s no remedy, no stopping, but it takes a whole life of failures to see it. To prove it. To tell whether someone has Ghandi’s inherent fidelity or not. And by then of course it’s too late, all the damage is done. But these last few years I’ve been wondering. What if we could tell right at the start? What if we could look at that baby and know before?”
* * *
Nothing good ever happens at 3:30 a.m.
I’m still struggling to wake up as I park the car where Tobe stands, waiting in the cold. Visible only because his gaunt figure parts the thin edge of predawn light on the horizon. The only thing you can’t see. But I know it’s him. Know he’s there. This isn’t our first 3:30 a.m.
“Tobe,” I greet as he gets in without a word and starts clicking through the police channels on the radio. But no one else is talking either.
“Know what it is?” he asks.
“No. Got the Rapid Response call direct from Dispatch. They said the call went out from Martin. I tried contacting him but he’s not answering. Call out said both of us and now. Address is out in Lawrence, 40 miles away. We won’t be there in time,” I reply.
“Martin wouldn’t have called us if he thought that. Burn it,” Tobe says as he buckles himself in. I punch the gears, pushing the still-cold engine into a scratchy, impatient roar. Frost on the road drags at us in the turns as we accelerate. As I pass the speed limit I flick on the roof lights and siren and turn off the headlights. It’s an old trick. If you’re heading for an intersection at speed you can usually tell if another car is coming from the side because the beams from their headlights become visible if they’re close enough. Means you can speed through if you only see darkness. Of course, it only works if your own headlights are turned off. And there’s no one else using the same trick at the same time.
Out on the open road the engine revs climb to a tensioned peak just as we start picking up radio chatter from Dispatch. Whatever is out there is bad, getting worse, because the call out list keeps getting longer. Tactical. FLIR Camera Unit. Uniforms. Ambulance. More Uniforms. And us.
“Who do we know in Lawrence?” I ask, trying to figure out why we’ve been called out. Tobe and I work for GIC. This stands for Gang Intelligence Centre, a national inter-agency task force dealing in organised crime. It might sound impressive, but way down south here it mostly means Tobe and me and all the bad people we know.
“No one. Lawrence is a small town on the way to nowhere. Had a gold rush there centuries ago. Everybody came. The gold ran out. Everybody left. Now it’s just a place,” Tobe says.
“A place that has a lot of cops heading to it,” I say as I see police lights flicker on the road ahead of us.
“Maybe they found something else,” Tobe suggests, then picks up the radio and says, “Dispatch, Unit 30. Can I get a code on our call out?”
After a moment we hear, “It’s a 1210. Shots fired.”
“Bad combination,” Tobe says as he clicks off the radio. A 1210 is a hostage situation. And Tobe’s right, it’s a bad combination. A hostage situation and shots fired. Most hostage situations involve a weapon but there’s a big difference in outcome that is directly related to whether people have actually used that weapon or not. When they haven’t, your chances of a peaceful resolution are usually about three out of four. When they have, it drops to less than one in four. Like something about pulling the trigger for that first time makes it easier to pull it for the last time.
* * *
The constellation of flickering blue lights is impossible to miss. It would actually be pretty if you didn’t know what was in the middle of it. Looks even more out of place against the quaint background of small-town cottages and flowered front gardens. At the centre of it all stands an ordinary house on an ordinary street. Even in the cold pre-dawn gloom of 4:30 a.m. you can make out the mundane artefacts of family life all around. Front gardens scattered with kids’ bikes, garbage bins lined up neatly. Fading hopscotch lines are chalked on the sidewalk. Not rich, not poor, not anything really. There is even a garden gnome smiling next to the mailbox.
The only things that don’t fit are all of us. A heaving oval of cops, medics, fire service and a smattering of other people who only ever show up when bad things happen. The bigger the group the worse the thing mostly.
“Who’s got site do you think?” I ask, still absorbing it all as I park the car. I try to still the trembling in my hands before it gets to full shaking. I know Tobe notices but he doesn’t say anything.
“They’ll be arguing. Shots fired will mean Tactical’s probably going to win though. How long until that happens depends on how angry Martin gets. Let’s find him and figure out why we’re here,” Tobe says as he gets out of the car.
Unfolding hostage situations aren’t our beat. Working for the Gang Intelligence Centre means we’re mostly called in either well before or long after the bad things happen. Not during; during means chaotic crime. We do organised.
The cold outside the car hits you like a wall, burns the breath into your chest. As we’re crossing the road gun shots suddenly shatter the quiet, making us duck for cover. It’s just instinct and habit though. We’re not close or even in line of site from the house. When nothing else happens we slowly get up again.
I see Tobe wincing as he limps ahead of me across the street.
“Your leg again?” I ask.
“Hurts when a storm’s coming,” Tobe answers over his shoulder, speeding up, too stubborn to let the limp slow him down. Three years ago we had a tough arrest; the guy ran over Tobe’s leg with his car, twice, before we got him. Now he has nuts and bolts
keeping it together.
The doctors told him then give to it up, even signed off on a disability pay-out because he’s over 60. Tobe turned them down. A whole life spent on the force. I don’t think he knows how to do anything else, or even how much of him would be left over to go and do it.
One of the Uniform guys hunkering behind a car on the perimeter recognises us and lifts the scene tape to let us through.
“Jase, where’s Martin?” I ask him quietly as we pass under the barrier.
“Just follow the yelling Nick,” he answers wearily, nodding towards the Comms truck. We stay low as we quickly head over, already making out the strained tones of people trying to yell at each other while also trying to whisper.
“—telling you that if we do that we’re going to get that family killed.”
“Look, we’ve got good eyes in there. If we feed that to the sniper scopes we’ve got head or chest shots on four out of five of them. Time them with a flash grenade and full breach and number five is down in seconds,” we hear Tom Parata, the Tactical leader, whisper as we come up.
“They’ve already fired on us. Protocol gives us the go ahead, what more do you want?” Tom argues heatedly. A large, muscled Māori man, Tom towers over the much smaller, scrawny figure of Martin, our captain.
“I want you to re-attach your man-sized balls,” Martin says in an aggressive tone as he prods Tom in the chest while actually having to crane his neck backwards to stare up into his face. “They didn’t hit any of us and they’re only doing it every 10 minutes or so. Doesn’t even look like they’re really trying. I also want you to think worse-case scenario. You shoot his four friends in the head and number five is going to start feeling a tad more intense about his life choices. How many kids does he shoot before we get him down? How many others fire from spasm as we hit them? What about ricochets? We’re going to keep talking to them. Come sunrise they’ll see it’s a brand-new day with all of us out here and realise how completely and resoundingly fucked they are and give up. Then, once they’re out here, you can shoot them. Ok?”
